President Barack Obama on Thursday wished Muslims in America and around the world "Eid Mubarak!" or a blessed Eid, praising efforts to recognize the end of Ramadan as a holiday.

"The holiday is a reminder to every American of the importance of respecting those of all faiths and beliefs," he said in a statement that also hailed New York City's decision to add Eid to the official school calendar.

An Indian couple forbidden to marry because of their different backgrounds are in hospital after slitting their own throats in an apparent suicide pact at India's famed monument to love, the Taj Mahal.

Police said the pair -- named in the Times of India as Rajveer Singh and Shabnam Ali -- were stable after they were discovered in a pool of blood in the grounds of the Taj Mahal on Wednesday afternoon.

In Moscow, a sprawling city with highly-prized green spaces, hundreds of locals are up in arms to defend a park against what they claim is an illegal landgrab by Russia's powerful Orthodox Church.

Dmitry Fedotov, a 28-year-old engineer who lives near northern Moscow's Torfyanka park, joined protesters last week to denounce the church's bid to build a chapel there, as part of a drive to erect 200 churches across the Russian capital.

During the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Muslims are called on to reflect on their faith as they conduct their daily fast. This past month, some clerics and scholars reflected on ways to reform the religious discourse in Islam to keep up with modern-day challenges and oppose extremism.

A popular Egyptian religious figure used his daily TV show to talk about ways to renew interpretation of Islam's holy book, the Quran. The United Arab Emirates hosted a series of Ramadan mosque lectures by dozens of clerics, including many from al-Azhar, Egypt's premier Sunni Muslim center of thought and learning, and a popular American sheikh, who warned that renovation is needed in Islam after centuries of neglect in thought left the Muslim world in disrepair.

The spiritual leader of a Chinese Buddhist sect is to be prosecuted for financial and sexual offences, state media said Thursday, as Beijing intensifies its crackdown on what it calls dangerous cults.

Wu Zeheng, the leader of the Huazang Dharma group, will face a number of charges, including rape and using a cult "to sabotage law enforcement", the official Xinhua news agency said.

Iraq's antiquities minister says the Baghdad National Museum has gotten back nearly 500 artifacts recovered by U.S. Army commandos during a recent raid in Syria targeting the Islamic State group.

Minister Adel Fahad Sharshab pledged that authorities will recover all missing artifacts. He spoke Wednesday as the recovered pieces were on display.

A Samsung company on Wednesday removed online cartoons attacking a U.S. hedge fund's founder as a ravenous, big-beaked vulture after Jewish organizations protested similar smears in South Korea's media.

The hedge fund, Elliott, is opposing a takeover deal between two Samsung companies that critics say will ensure the current generation of Samsung's founding family retains control over South Korea's biggest conglomerate.

Grave robbers have stolen from a crypt the head of German expressionist cinema great Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, director of the silent-film vampire classic "Nosferatu", reports said Wednesday.

Police did not rule out an occultist motive after finding candle wax in the family crypt in Stahnsdorf southwest of Berlin and were investigating the case on charges of theft and disturbing the peace of the dead.

South Korea has decided to return one of two ancient Buddha statutes that were stolen by Korean thieves in Japan three years ago, the prosecutor general's office said Wednesday.

Although Japan had demanded the return of both Korean-made statues, the prosecutor said the second likeness would remain in South Korea pending the resolution of a dispute over its original ownership.

A former SS officer known as the Bookkeeper of Auschwitz said he was "very sorry" for his time stationed at the death camp, ahead of a verdict expected Wednesday in his trial.

"No-one should have taken part in Auschwitz," Oskar Groening, 94, told a court in the northern city of Lueneburg Tuesday.