With scenes of religious coexistence and vintage elegance in a more cosmopolitan era, an Egyptian soap opera aims to dispel prejudice towards the country's long-vilified and nearly extinct Jewish community.

"The Jewish Quarter" shows life inside Cairo's Haret al-Yahud district during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, depicting an almost idyllic portrait of a society where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived side by side.

Sixty-five extremely rare pink and red diamonds were unveiled Friday by mining giant Rio Tinto which expects the stones from a remote western Australia mine to fetch record prices.

The diamonds come from the Anglo-Australian firm's Argyle mine -- where more than 90 percent of the world's pink and red jewels are produced each year.

Two Moroccan women who walked through a market wearing dresses are facing charges of "gross indecency", a rights group and media reported Thursday, sparking an outcry in the kingdom.

The women were arrested on June 16 as they strolled through the open-air market in Inezgane, a suburb of the southern city of Agadir, on their way to work, said Fouzia Assouli, head of women's rights organization LDDF.

When it comes to history, soccer's classic derby matches are put in the shade by the Calcio Storico Fiorentino, a fixture that has been played in Florence since the 16th Century.

Every year on June 24, the feast day of the city's patron saint, St John the Baptist, sees teams from two of the four historic neighbourhoods do battle in the final of a competition that wraps football and rugby skills into something that resembles a mass brawl conducted in historical costume.

A sculpture by renowned French artist Auguste Rodin, only cast in bronze for the first time last year, sold for more than $1 million at a London sale on Tuesday.

The sculpture of "Aphrodite", moulds of which were until recently thought lost, was created by Rodin in 1913 for a play of the same name in Paris -- but at the time it was cast only in plaster for its appearance on stage.

Mozambique and Angola this year mark four decades of independence from Portugal, with robust economic growth rates buoyed by abundant natural resources giving the southern African nations reason to celebrate.

A prime investment destination following the recent discovery of huge natural gas and coal deposits, Mozambique will be the first to mark its freedom on Thursday.

A Nazi-looted painting that was hidden for decades is being auctioned by Sotheby's Wednesday in a rare sale as investigators work painstakingly to identify the origins of hundreds of other works from the same haul.

Max Liebermann's "Two Riders on a Beach" was found among more than 1,200 works of art in the Munich apartment of German recluse Cornelius Gurlitt when police raided it in 2012, capturing global attention.

IS destroys ancient Islamic mausoleums in Syria's PalmyraIslamic State group fighters have destroyed two ancient Muslim mausoleums in the historic Syrian city of Palmyra, the country's antiquities director said Tuesday.

Maamoun Abdulkarim said IS jihadists blew up the tombs of Mohammed bin Ali, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed's cousin, and Nizar Abu Bahaaeddine, a religious figure from Palmyra, three days ago. 

Sister Nirmala Joshi, who succeeded Mother Teresa as head of her Missionaries of Charity in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata, died on Tuesday at the age of 81, church officials said. 

Joshi had been suffering from a heart condition and her health had been deteriorating recently, confining her to a Missionaries of Charity home, Archbishop of Kolkata Thomas D'Souza and media reports said.

An internationally celebrated South Korean novelist has apologized over a plagiarism scandal that has shocked her country and prompted a publisher to stop printing one of her books, a report said Tuesday. 

Man Asian Literary Prize-winning author Shin Kyung-Sook met with public fury after allegations surfaced last week that she had copied a piece by the famed late Japanese author Yukio Mishima.