After giving up all worldly possessions, they wander the Bangladesh countryside dressed in white robes, singing of peace and love for all with their single-stringed ektaras.

Bangladesh's "mystic minstrels" have long been dismissed as hippies and even attacked and killed after being branded heretics in the Muslim-majority country.

A year after Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature and was cited for her mastery of the modern short story, her publisher has collected 24 of her stories published over the past two decades.

"Family Furnishings" serves as a companion volume to an earlier compendium, "Selected Stories," and is as good a place as any to get acquainted with her distinctive voice: pitiless and tender, solemn and sly, elegant and clunky, and always, terrifyingly intelligent.

Acclaimed Greek author Menis Koumandareas, found dead in his Athens home over the weekend, was beaten and strangled, autopsy results showed Monday.

The author, who lived alone in the working-class district of Kypseli, also had wounds on his face and abdomen, a police source said.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed on Monday to make lessons in the Arabic-alphabet Ottoman language compulsory in high schools -- a highly symbolic move which enraged secularists who claim he is pursuing an increasingly Islamist agenda.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, abolished the Ottoman language in 1928, replacing its Arabic alphabet with a Latin one.

Mario Goetze's World Cup-winning left shoe has fetched a donation of 2 million euros (nearly $2.5 million) at a children's charity gala in Germany and is headed for a museum.

The Bayern Munich player scored Germany's winning goal against Argentina with his left foot during extra time in the World Cup final in July.

Joe DiMaggio's love letter to Marilyn Monroe has sold for $78,125 at a Beverly Hills auction.

Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills says the letter, written by the New York Yankees baseball star after Monroe announced she was divorcing him, was sold Saturday to an undisclosed buyer.

A dozen top ballet stars including Svetlana Zakharova and Natalia Osipova put up a dazzling performance Sunday at a keenly awaited but politically sensitive gala at Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre in support of young dancers in war-torn Ukraine.

During the benefit organised by The Bolshoi's Ukrainian-born prima ballerina Zakharova, dancers from top international companies performed highlights from a range of ballets.

Like a mirage in the middle of Beirut's high-rise seafront, the exquisite mansion is a lonely reminder of this city's romantic past.

Rose House is an architectural gem, an Ottoman villa perched rather bizarrely next to an equally elegant lighthouse overlooking the Mediterranean.

Perched atop a wooded Berlin hill, an abandoned Cold War listening post where NATO once eavesdropped on their communist foes is a reminder of Germany's tumultuous past.

Today tourists flock to the conspicuous historical relic, known as Teufelsberg, or Devil's Mountain, complete with its three white radar domes resembling giant golf balls.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts broke ground Thursday on a major expansion to be completed in time for the 100th anniversary of the slain president's birthday in 2017.

Vice President Joe Biden oversaw a ceremonial groundbreaking that used the same shovel then-president Lyndon Johnson wielded in 1964 when construction on the cultural venue first began.