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."

It's nearly midnight and in a matter of minutes Greece will leave the euro. Banks are shuttered, TV shows heatedly debate whether salaries will be paid... and Inspector Haritos has a new crime to solve.

The prescient, if fictional, setting for a novel by Greece's "cult" crime writer Petros Markaris was written three years ago and has captured readers' imaginations well beyond Greece's borders -- especially in Germany.

Last year a 600 kilogram (1,300 pound) bull jammed a horn as thick as a man's arm through Bill Hillmann's thigh twice, narrowly missing his femoral artery.

It was his first goring in 10 years of running with the bulls at Spain's famous San Fermin festival, but not the first time he got injured.

Twenty gay and lesbian couples got married in a mass wedding on an Acapulco beach on Friday, one month after Mexico's top court all but legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

With Guerrero state's governor and wife as witnesses, the 15 male and five female couples exchanged vows as the sun set, surrounded by some 200 people in a celebration that included cake and a mariachi band.

French police officers have been given approval to sport beards and tattoos on the job so long as they respect certain conditions, officials said Friday.

Responding to a police officers' union request, officials said French cops may wear beards on duty "as long as they are clean and well-trimmed," and may indulge in the current male fashion of letting stubble grow two or three days between shaves.