Nice-guy Pope Francis looks set to have his mettle tested by his first mutiny in the ranks this weekend at a Catholic meeting on the contentious issue of traditional marriage.

The Church has long refused to relax rules for "sinners", but amid a flurry of countries legalizing same-sex marriage and a rise in divorce levels, reform-minded Francis has suggested there may be wiggle-room on doctrine, sparking panic among conservatives.

If the Socialist government gets its way, visitors to France's three most touristic museums — the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay and Versailles Palace — may get to visit seven days a week in coming years.

But a powerful labor union could get in the way.

There is a whiff of sheep dung in the early evening air as the sun drops from sight and Ali Al-Shamrani ponders the market for his animals ahead of Saturday's Eid al-Adha festival.

"This year they are more expensive," he says outside a pen of about 40 Saudi Arabian Naimy-variety sheep, most of them with brown heads and thick dirty-white fleece.

What brings more fame than accepting the Nobel Prize? Not accepting it -- as Jean-Paul Sartre showed with a celebrated "non" to the world's most prestigious award exactly 50 years ago.

When the Swedish Academy made the announcement on October 22, 1964 that the French philosopher had won the prize for literature, he was lunching at a restaurant near the Parisian home of fellow intellectual heavyweight Simone de Beauvoir.

Every year ahead of the Muslim feast of sacrifice, a showroom in Indonesia swaps cars for hulking cows costing up to $25,000 each, seeking to lure a wealthy elite increasingly keen on ploughing money into celebrating their religion.

Some of the world's top authors will thrash out hot political issues at the world's biggest international book fair opening in Germany Tuesday.

For decades, whiskeys have been the status beverage of choice in Venezuela: an expensive, imported taste acquired during the country's oil boom.

But with the economy now in a bust, Venezuelans are increasingly returning to long-snubbed local rum to drown their sorrows.

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Hundreds of thousands of Muslim pilgrims began a mass movement out of the holy city of Mecca towards the nearby Mina Valley in Saudi Arabia on Thursday, beginning the hajj.

One of the world's largest annual gatherings and a pillar of the Islamic faith, this year's hajj comes with authorities striving to protect pilgrims from two deadly viruses, Ebola and the MERS coronavirus.

Visitors who wear face veils to Australia's Parliament House have been restricted to sound-proof enclosed galleries usually reserved for noisy school groups under a new counterterrorism security measure.

Some senators accused the Parliament of sending a message to the nation that Muslim women can be treated as second-class citizens.