Cierra Dorsey has happy memories of hanging out at the mall as a teenage girl, an adolescent rite of passage under threat in parts of the U.S. as old-fashioned malls close their doors.

While high-end malls thrive, many others have been unable to keep up with changing shopping demands of American consumers, leading to obituaries in the U.S. press with headlines such as "A dying breed: The American shopping mall," and "Shopping Malls In Crisis."

Australia's failure to end the entrenched disadvantage of Aboriginal people was described by Prime Minister Tony Abbott Wednesday as "profoundly disappointing" with key targets missed and employment levels actually worsening.

Abbott -- who has prioritised improving the lives of indigenous Australians -- said progress had been made in some health and education areas, but most goals were not being met and more work needed to be done for the country's most impoverished community.

A new study spotlights America's brutal legacy of racial violence, revealing that nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched in the south from 1877 to 1950, an average of more than one a week for 73 years.

The Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights group in Alabama that conducted the research, said present day racial discrimination and criminal justice problems are rooted in the country's violent past.

A centuries-old tomb in southern Egypt was partly demolished when a crane lifting blocks of sculpted masonry sliced through its dome, officials said on Tuesday.

Monday's accident happened when workmen were using the crane to move large blocks of stone to a site in the town of Aswan where an international exhibition for sculpture is being held.

On the day Nelson Mandela walked free 25 years ago, he went missing for more than an hour somewhere between the prison gates and the venue where he was to deliver his first speech.

Mandela's convoy had left Victor Verster Prison, but never made it to Cape Town City Hall -- where a huge crowd was waiting to welcome him.

Nepal should legalize same-sex marriage, a committee charged with implementing a Supreme Court order to improve the country's gay rights record has said.

The report, which the committee of legal and human rights experts submitted to the government this week, also includes recommendations on adoption by gay couples, one of its members told Agence France Presse.

Forty years after Cyprus was divided by a bloody conflict, the island's Greek and Turkish communities are trying to overcome their differences and find an unusual common cause: halloumi cheese.

Efforts to have the increasingly popular "squeaky" cheese granted a protected European Union status have raised fears that Turkish Cypriot producers will be excluded.

It is a delicate subject which has been taboo since biblical times but now an Israeli documentary has broken new ground by exploring the ultra-Orthodox Jewish ban on masturbation.

"Sacred Sperm" was born from the worries of a religiously observant father, Ori Gruder, who did not know how to talk to his 10-year-old son about the act of masturbation or sex in general. 

Germany's economy minister on Monday rejected calls by Greece's new prime minister for Berlin to pay reparations for World War II damages by the Nazis, insisting the issue was concluded 25 years ago.

"The likelihood is zero," Sigmar Gabriel, who is also Germany's vice-chancellor, said at a gathering of his Social Democrats in Brandenburg state near Berlin.

In sky-blue army uniforms emblazoned with red stars, they could be Communist comrades from China's civil war. But in fact the youngsters are the targets of a modern campaign for hearts and minds, with the classroom as its battleground.

"We are the new generation of little Red Army warriors," the children sang, tunics and belts matching the ones donned by Mao Zedong's troops when they marched across China. "We march onwards with incomparable firmness."