When she sways to the sensual beat of samba, Megumi Kudo also heals the wounds in her mother's heart from a huge earthquake that shattered their home city in Japan 20 years ago.

This year's festive menu for the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro has special poignancy for the Kudos, with daughter Megumi set to perform as a "passista" dancer with the famed Salgueiro school this weekend, continuing a tradition that has now spanned two generations.

The Mumbai neighborhood made famous by the film "Slumdog Millionaire" is set to host its first "biennale", aiming to promote health through creativity, although it will be very different to some of the world's grander art fairs.

The three-week festival, opening Sunday, will showcase works created by residents of Dharavi, the densely populated settlement in the heart of India's financial capital that is known as one of Asia's biggest slums.

Secular Turks opposed to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday boycotted schools and took to the streets to demand a secular education and denounce a claimed creeping Islamisation of the schools system.

The protests were led by Turkey's largest religious minority the Alevis, who adhere to an offshoot of Shia Islam, as well as leading education union Egitim Sen.

Indonesia's top Islamic clerical body threatened Friday to issue a fatwa against the sale of condoms following reports that the contraceptives were being sold together with chocolate to mark Valentine's Day.

Pictures of chocolate bars packaged with condoms have been published in newspapers and circulated on social media in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country in recent days.

Uzbekistan is urging young people to shun "alien" Valentine's Day traditions such as sending cards, saying they should instead enjoy the love poetry of a 15th-century warrior-prince.

The Central Asian country has turned February 14 into "national poetry day," as the government attempts to combat what it calls the "pernicious influence" of Western mass culture.

China should roll back its one-child policy and instead mandate that all couples have two children, a family planning official has said, drawing criticism Friday from a ruling Communist Party newspaper.

Mei Zhiqiang, deputy director the Family Planning Commission of Shanxi province, offered the recommendation earlier this week as a way to solve the country's increasingly problematic gender imbalance.

Top author David Grossman announced Thursday he will withdraw from contention for Israel's most prestigious arts and sciences award after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intervened to remove judges on political grounds.

The premier earlier this week had three of the Israel Prize judges removed, explaining on his Facebook page they were "extremist and anti-Zionist."

Harold Holzer, a longtime Abraham Lincoln scholar, has won a $50,000 prize for a book about the president and his relationship with the media.

Holzer's "Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion" has been chosen for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, announced Wednesday and administered by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Holzer has also written "Lincoln President-Elect," ''Lincoln at Cooper Union" and numerous other works.

Fans of Narendra Modi on Thursday scrapped plans to open a temple in his honor after the Indian premier said he was "appalled" by the idea.

Modi supporters had invested thousands of dollars in the temple in his home state of Gujarat, which houses a large statue of the charismatic leader -- a famously natty dresser -- and was due to open on Sunday.

A Tokyo district announced Thursday that it plans to issue "partnership" certificates to gay couples, becoming the first Japanese municipality to recognize same sex units -- albeit only symbolically.

The Shibuya district -- a crowded business hub that hosts many international firms and embassies, along with trendy fashion houses, cafes and schools -- said it planned to draft an ordinance designed to foster diversity and equality.