Several hundred people have attended a Mass at a Detroit Catholic church to protest an 8½-foot (2.6-meter)-tall bronze statue of Satan that hundreds of people also lined up to see.

The Satanic Temple had said it would unveil the statue Saturday at a Detroit location that only people with tickets would know. Hundreds lined up Saturday evening to get the tickets as Christian protesters rallied nearby.

The Bayreuth Festival, one of the hottest tickets in the world of opera, opened with a well-received new production of Richard Wagner's opera "Tristan and Isolde" on Saturday, which also won praise from German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The dark and pessimistic new reading of one of Wagner's best-loved works by the composer's 37-year-old great-granddaughter, Katharina Wagner, was greeted with cheers and generous applause at the end of the six-hour performance.

A court in northeast China has sentenced five people to prison for spreading the teachings of a banned religious group that's been linked to a killing of a woman in a McDonald's restaurant last year.

The Intermediate Court in the city of Panjin said Saturday the five were sentenced of two to three years for undermining the implementation of the law, recruiting believers and propagating the group called Quannengshen.

Catholics in this Paraguayan town paid homage to St. Francis Solano on Friday in a peculiar religious festival that involves dressing up in bird-feather suits.

The celebration was held at the chapel that bears the name of the saint, who was born in Spain in 1549 and died in Peru 1610. Solano was canonized in 1726.

On the mean and traffic-choked streets of Mexico City, a fearless superhero is fighting to protect the planet from the worst the internal combustion engine can throw at it.

The mighty Peatonito (Little Pedestrian) pushes cars blocking the path of pedestrians, creates crosswalks with spray paint, and climbs on vehicles parked on sidewalks -- though his mother has begged him to stop stepping on them.

Around the corner from a bland gray street in the working class Tres de Febrero suburb of Buenos Aires, a blue boat starts to take form on a wall.

Street artist Andres Rotundo Fraga, wearing a green overall and armed with a brush and some acrylic paint, has started a three-day project aimed at reviving an apartment wall damaged by indecipherable graffiti.

Cameroon has extended a ban on full Islamic veils in parts of the country as it seeks to curb Boko Haram violence after a string of suicide bombings by female attackers.

The decision comes less than a month after two female suicide bombers wearing full veils blew themselves up on the border with Nigeria in the north, killing 11.

Spain raised the minimum age for marriage from 14 to 16 on Thursday, in a reform that brings the law in line with the new age of consent.

The minimum age for marriage in exceptional cases, which require the consent of a judge, has been raised from 14 to 16, though the general rule is still that people need to be 18 to marry.

An iron and steel colossus that sank on a summer's night 35 years ago off Cyprus is now considered one of the world's best shipwreck dives.

Thousands dive down each year to see the Zenobia -- the "Titanic of the Mediterranean" -- which is slumped on its port side at a depth of 40 metres (130 feet) off the island.

For years Karachi's walls have been spattered with the bloodstains of murder victims and scrawled with graffiti touting everything from sectarian hatred to quack cures for erectile dysfunction.

Now a group of artists and volunteers are reclaiming the walls by painting them with cheerful designs aimed at bringing some happiness and pride back to an often violent, chaotic and corrupt city.