Canada's prime minister unveiled on Tuesday an office of religious freedom tasked with protecting and advocating on behalf of religious minorities under threat around the world.

Housed in Canada's foreign affairs ministry, the new office will oppose religious hatred and intolerance and promote pluralism "as a Canadian foreign policy priority," said a statement.

Letters from John Lennon's killer detailing his obsession with the novel "The Catcher in the Rye" to the police officer who arrested him went on sale Monday through a Los Angeles auction house.

The four missives from Mark David Chapman to Stephen Spiro are for sale through Moments In Time, which specializes in historical documents and rare autographs, at a fixed price of $75,000, auction house owner Gary Zimet said. Zimet is selling the letters on behalf of Spiro, who arrested Chapman on Dec. 8, 1980, shortly after he shot Lennon outside The Dakota, the ex-Beatle's Manhattan apartment building.

These museum goers didn't just leave their outerwear at the coat check. They handed over their shirts, trousers, underwear — everything, except their shoes and socks.

The occasion Monday at Vienna's Leopold Museum was a special after-hour showing of "Nude Men from 1800 to Today" — an exhibit of 300 paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures focused on the bare male.

The bells of Pristina's sole Orthodox Church toll for a liturgy that will bring brief spiritual peace to a small group of Serbs, remaining members of a dwindling community in Kosovo, five years after it broke away from Serbia.

At the Saint Nicolas church, three elderly Serbs listen to the mass held in a little corridor along the nave, too big and too cold for so few people.

Author Haruki Murakami's new novel will hit book stores in April, three years after the final installment of "1Q84", his Japanese publisher has said.

Publishing house Bungeishunju Ltd posted a small advert in newspapers on Saturday, which said only: "Haruki Murakami: Long awaited novel to arrive in April."

Grammy-winning fingerpicking guitarist Pat Donohue thinks a South Dakota college town of about 10,000 is an unlikely place for a wide-ranging collection of musical instruments that includes saxophones built by inventor Adolphe Sax, a rare Stradivarius violin with its original neck, and a Spanish guitar on which Bob Dylan composed some of his earliest songs.

But that's part of the charm of the 40-year-old National Music Museum, a treasure tucked away in an old Carnegie library building on the University of South Dakota campus.

A judge being interviewed for a Supreme Court job jokes that women might enjoy rape. A local official takes a 17-year-old second wife, then quickly divorces her by text message.

Both cases reflect attitudes toward women's rights and safety that have persisted for years in this Southeast Asian archipelago nation of 240 million people. The difference now: Both officials are at risk of losing their jobs.

Eccentric Australian gambler David Walsh is shaking up the sleepy city of Hobart with an unorthodox new museum challenging visitors to a new pact with fermenting, defecating and dying art.

It is an unassuming site for what has fast become one of Australia's most talked-about tourist attractions, a rusted, hulking edifice perched on a hillside 100 steps up from the Derwent River in the island state of Tasmania.

Nearly one year after the fierce Syrian army takeover of Baba Amr, the former rebel stronghold in the central city of Homs, residents eke out a living in a devastated neighborhood frozen in time.

Bullet-pocked walls, collapsed balconies, fallen telephone poles and abandoned apartments make up the desolate scene.

At least 18 ancient mosaics depicting scenes from Homer's "The Odyssey" have been stolen in northern Syria, the culture minister was quoted as saying on Sunday.

"These mosaics were stolen during illegal excavations" on archaeological sites in the war-torn country's northeast, Lubana Mushaweh said in an interview published on Sunday by the government daily Tishreen.