Open the door of a seemingly normal New York apartment and the unwary visitor is transported to another world. Tribal drums jostle for space with forbidding statues and flamboyant masks.

Eric Edwards, a retired phone company executive born and bred in Brooklyn, has spent 44 years amassing an astonishing African art collection.

Islamic State group jihadists have destroyed a famous statue of a lion outside the museum in the Syrian city of Palmyra, the country's antiquities director said Thursday.

Maamoun Abdelkarim said the statue, known as the Lion of Al-Lat, was an irreplaceable piece and was apparently destroyed last week.

The U.N. cultural agency on Thursday placed two ancient cities in conflict-torn Yemen, Sana'a and Shibam, on its list of endangered World Heritage sites.

UNESCO said Sana'a, known for its many Islamic sites and multi-story rammed earth houses, "sustained serious damage due to armed conflict" between Iran-backed rebels and the beleaguered Saudi-supported government.

A junior minister in the Italian government has gone on hunger strike in a protest aimed at speeding up moves to introduce civil unions for gay couples.

Ivan Scalfarotto, 49, said in his blog he was aiming to force discussion of the issue into the mainstream and rally the support of "all those people of good faith who have been thinking up until now that it was enough just to wait."

Two self-portraits by Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon, never seen before in public, sold for £30 million at a London sale on Wednesday, months after being rediscovered in a private collection.

One of the portraits, painted in 1975, fetched £15.3 million ($24 million) while the other work, from 1980, went for £14.7 million when it went under the hammer at Sotheby's.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott Thursday brushed off mounting pressure for a parliamentary vote on same-sex marriage from within his conservative coalition, saying he was more focused on the economy and security.

A marriage equality bill is set to be proposed by a Liberal Party backbencher when parliament returns in August, seconded by an opposition Labor representative, with other co-sponsors from multiple parties, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

The head of the U.N. cultural organization on Wednesday called for a campaign against the "culture cleansing" being carried out by Islamic State jihadists.

"Extremists don't destroy heritage as a collateral damage, they target it systematically to strike societies at their core," Irina Bokova said in a speech at the Chatham House think tank in London.

An Israeli court has awarded a rare collection of Franz Kafka's manuscripts to the country's national library, ending a long legal battle worthy of one of the Prague-born writer's complex stories.

The judgment, published Wednesday, ordered Tel Aviv resident Eva Hoffe to hand all the papers in her possession to the National Library of Israel.

At a militant training camp in Pakistan, a new recruit asks his instructor why his comrades are attacking churches and mosques rather than enemy bases. "This world is full of sin. It needs to be bathed in blood," the instructor replies, nurturing seeds of doubt that will eventually lead the young man to turn away from violence.

It's a scene from a three-part comic book, titled "The Guardian," that a private group has started to distribute in Pakistani schools to help combat extremism. The author, 31-year-old Gauher Aftab, says it was inspired by his own experience of nearly joining militants fighting in Kashmir as a teenager.

Episcopalians are set to vote Wednesday on allowing religious weddings for same-sex couples, just days after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide.

In 2003, the U.S. branch of the global Anglican Communion made the trailblazing move of electing the first openly gay bishop. Since then, many dioceses have allowed their priests to perform civil same-sex weddings.