A Russian atheist social networking page was blocked Monday on the back of a court ruling that it insulted the feelings of religious believers.

The group called "There is no God" on the VKontakte networking site -- which had over 26,000 followers -- went offline for users across the whole country.

For years, Christian pilgrims have waded into the Jordan River from both its eastern and western banks to connect with a core event of their faith — the baptism of Jesus. The parallel traditions allowed Jordan and Israel to compete for tourism dollars in marketing one of Christianity's most important sites.

But now UNESCO has weighed in on the rivalry, designating Jordan's baptismal area on the eastern bank a World Heritage site. The U.N. cultural agency declared this month that the site "is believed to be" the location of Jesus' baptism, based on what it said is a view shared by most Christian churches.

It was home to the army of colonial bureaucrats who ran India, so it was perhaps inevitable that the original 18th-century plans for Kolkata's Writers' Building would be found buried under reams of paperwork.

"We even wrote to the British Library in the hope that some of the drawings might have been preserved there," says architect Madhumita Roy as she talks through some of the problems her team has faced trying to restore one of India's most iconic buildings to its original glory.

Deep underground, where huge conveyer belts haul rocks to the surface, 33-year-old mother of two Bernice Motsieloa represents the quiet revolution transforming the macho culture of South African mining.

Motsieloa is a shift supervisor at Anglo American's Bathopele platinum mine -- one of several thousand female miners employed in a difficult and often dangerous environment traditionally dominated by men.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday sought to calm angry U.S. Jews after his religious affairs minister questioned the Jewishness of the Reform movement, to which many of them belong.

"Israel is a home for all Jews," he said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting.

Iran has changed a law to make divorce by mutual consent invalid unless couples have first undergone state-run counselling, the country's latest move to tackle a rise in broken marriages.

The measures, reported by media at the weekend, are contained in a new family law that a top official said would be implemented by Iran's judiciary.

A bomb explosion Sunday in a tunnel near Aleppo Citadel in Syria damaged a wall of the fortress that is part of the UNESCO-listed Old City, state media and a monitor reported.

The blast partly destroyed the wall of the monumental 13th century citadel that overlooks the Old City, said the official SANA news agency and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

India's mass Hindu pilgrimage, the Kumbh Mela, officially starts in Maharashtra state Tuesday, with organizers desperate to avoid a repeat of a deadly stampede at the same venue 12 years ago.

Thirty-nine pilgrims were trampled to death and dozens injured when the religious festival was last held on the banks of the Godavari river in the city of Nashik, around 160 kilometers (100 miles) northeast of Mumbai, in 2003.

Residents of the Saudi Red Sea city of Jeddah are slowly returning to its historic centre, where a Ramadan cultural festival and UN heritage status are giving new life to the old quarter.

Last year the United Nations added Jeddah to its UNESCO global heritage list, acknowledging its distinctive architecture, which evolved from the city's centuries-old role as a global trading hub and the gateway for pilgrims visiting Islam's holiest sites.

Harper Lee's unexpected new novel offers an unexpected and startling take on an American literary saint, Atticus Finch.

"Go Set a Watchman" is set in the 1950s, 20 years after Lee's celebrated "To Kill a Mockingbird," and finds Atticus hostile to the growing civil rights movement. In one particularly dramatic encounter with his now-adult daughter, Scout, the upright Alabama lawyer who famously defended a black man in "Mockingbird" condemns the NAACP as opportunists and troublemakers and labels blacks as too "backward" to "share fully in the responsibilities of citizenship."