Artwork from "Calvin and Hobbes" creator Bill Watterson's three-day return to comics has brought more than $74,000 at auction to benefit Parkinson's research.

Dallas-based Heritage Auctions says the three comic strips sold Friday for a combined $74,040 to three collectors, all of whom wish to remain anonymous. Heritage had expected the strips to sell for more than $30,000 combined.

One woman has been arrested and more than a dozen are being sought by Malaysian authorities after images of a nudist sports festival triggered outrage in the Muslim-majority country, police said Friday.

A video of the gathering, called the "Nude Sport Games 2014", first appeared on social media earlier this week and went viral.

Christianity was born in ancient Palestine and remained rooted in the wider Middle East even after its conquest by Muslim armies centuries ago, but Christians now face the insecurity of jihadist threats and many are going into exile.

Here is a break-down of the situation faced by Christians in key parts of the region:

The global art market rose in value by 17 percent to a record $7 billion in the first half of 2014, according to new industry figures.

Artprice, a French company which tracks art sales worldwide, said that during the first six months of the year art works sold at public auction totalled $7.15 billion ($5.22 billion euros), up on $6.11 billion for the same period in 2013.

Dating is never easy but finding the perfect partner when you live in a tiny, remote village in the Vietnamese mountains is almost impossible. The solution? A love market.

For generations, young people from the patchwork of ethnic minority groups in northern Vietnam have gone to the local town of Sapa on a Saturday night to find their future spouse.

Besides saunas and Nokia cellphones, it may very well be Finland's most successful export item ever: the Moomin universe, peopled by a group of bulky, white creatures resembling hippos.

A century after the birth of their creator, the late Tove Jansson, the odd charm of the quirky Moomin books and cartoons has won over millions in all age groups and dozens of languages from Czech to Chinese, Estonian to Esperanto.

China will construct a "Chinese Christian theology" suitable for the country, state media reported Thursday, with both believer numbers and tensions with authorities on the rise.

China has between 23 million and 40 million Protestants, accounting for 1.7 to 2.9 percent of the total population, the state-run China Daily said, citing figures given at a seminar in Shanghai.

Saudi men have been banned from marrying women from three Asian and one African country as the Gulf state toughens the rules restricting marriage with foreigners, a local daily said.

Marrying women from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar and Chad is no longer permissible, Makkah newspaper reported.

For years, librarians at a small central Illinois library gossiped that a tattered book lying on one of its shelves justifying racism may have been in the hands of none other than Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator.

On Tuesday, state historians confirmed that theory by announcing Lincoln's handwriting had been found inside the cover of the 700-page text, at the same time taking great pains to offer reassurance that the former president who ended slavery in the U.S. didn't subscribe to the theories at hand, but likely read the book to better educate himself about his opponents' line of thinking.

A city in China's mainly Muslim Xinjiang region has banned people with large beards or Islamic clothing from travelling on public buses, state media said, prompting outrage from an overseas rights group Wednesday.

Authorities in Karamay banned people wearing hijabs, niqabs, burkas, or clothing with the Islamic star and crescent symbol from taking local buses, the Karamay Daily reported.