Italy's gaffe-prone former premier Silvio Berlusconi sparked outrage Sunday with remarks praising wartime dictator Benito Mussolini despite Il Duce's persecution of Jews and allowing thousands to be deported to Auschwitz.

"The racial laws were the worst mistake of a leader, Mussolini, who however did good things in so many other areas," Berlusconi, who is angling for a return to politics in elections next month, said on the sidelines of a ceremony marking Holocaust Remembrance Day in Milan.

In Hanoi, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the best pho noodle soup is found in the grimiest restaurants, where the staff are rude, the queues long, and the surroundings spartan at best.

Pho, a simple soup of beef broth, herbs, spices and rice noodles, emerged some 100 years ago in north Vietnam and has since acquired a global following, beloved by French celebrity chefs and cash-strapped American students alike.

The world's largest annual migration began Saturday in China with tens of thousands in the capital boarding trains to journey home for next month's Lunar New Year celebrations.

Passengers will log 220 million train rides during the 40-day travel season, the Ministry of Railways estimates, as they criss-cross the country to celebrate with their families on February 10.

The Tibetan prime minister in exile called Friday for traditional new year celebrations to be shelved as a mark of respect to the nearly 100 people who have self-immolated in the last three years.

A total of 99 Tibetans have set themselves alight to protest Chinese rule in Tibet since 2009, according to the latest tally from the Tibetan government in exile in India.

All of the $1.3 billion Holocaust restitution fund created by Swiss banks in 1998 has been returned to victims, a judge involved in the case said in an interview published Thursday.

Fifteen years after Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse agreed to return assets from dormant bank accounts belonging to Holocaust victims, U.S. judge Edward Korman, who oversaw the lawsuits that led to the massive $1.25-billion settlement, said the entire amount plus interest had been doled out.

Turkey's parliament passed a law late Thursday giving Kurds the right to use their own language in court, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

The right to give testimony in their mother tongue was one of the key demands raised by hundreds of prison inmates who went on a 68-day hunger strike that ended in November.

Pope Benedict XVI put Catholic Church leaders on notice Thursday, saying social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter aren't a virtual world they can ignore, but rather a very real world they must engage if they want to spread the faith to the next generation.

The 85-year-old Benedict, who tweets in nine languages, used his annual message on social communications to stress the potential of social media for the church as it struggles to keep followers and attract new ones amid religious apathy, competition from other churches and scandals that have driven the faithful away.

Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou would consider cultural agreements with China, an official said Wednesday, triggering an angry response from the island's anti-Beijing opposition.

Lin Join-sane, chairman of the quasi-official Straits Exchange Foundation became the first Taiwanese official to raise the possibility of a culture deal and said the view reflected that of Ma's.

Uruguayans are petitioning the Royal Spanish Academy to expunge as discriminatory the expression "to work like a black" from its dictionary, the ultimate authority on the Spanish language.

"We ask that you review this expression's remaining in the dictionary," said the petition. "We, for our part, commit ourselves to erase all discriminatory expressions from our plazas, our playing fields, our schools and especially our houses."

When Kholoud Sukkariyah and Nidal Darwish married in defiance of Lebanon's ban on civil unions, they had no idea their initiative would attract so much support from fellow citizens -- and even the president.

The entire process took nearly a year and was done in secret to sidestep political obstacles.