Australia will hold a voluntary postal vote on whether to legalise gay marriage if parliament rejects plans for a plebiscite on the contentious issue, the prime minister said Tuesday.

Parliament's upper house, the Senate, last November rebuffed plans for a national plebiscite involving 15 million people, with the Labor opposition, Greens and crossbench MPs arguing it would be expensive and spark divisive debate.

Researchers may have found the home town of Peter and two other apostles of Jesus near the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, an archaeologist said Monday.

Russian police on Monday detained two members of Pussy Riot after they staged a protest in support of a jailed Ukrainian filmmaker in a Siberian city.

Antoun Tawil, one of Syria's last traditional lute makers, waits in vain in his Damascus workshop for orders of the oud, an instrument his country was once renowned for producing.

Having lost their heads, been pulled from their plinths, smashed and even buried, things are at last looking up for some of the unluckiest statues in Christendom. 

Pakistani high school student Noman Afzal knows "traitorous" Hindus are to blame for the bloodshed that erupted when British India split into two nations 70 years ago. His history textbook tells him so.

From the Giza pyramids to the pharaonic tombs of Luxor, Egypt's ancient monuments are holding onto mysteries which researchers now aim to unravel with cutting edge technology.

For more than 200 years since Napoleon Bonaparte landed in Egypt with a retinue of scholars who laid the groundwork for modern Egyptology, experts have used science to unlock the secrets of the country's ancient treasures.

As part of its cultural partnerships, SGBL invited many clients and partners, on Friday, July 28, to the concert of the “Ceasar” of Arabic song, Kadim al Sahir, who “captivated the audience of the Beiteddine palace with the most beautiful songs on women and love, and with his deep and soft voice,” an SGBL statement said.

A tug of war has broken out over an ancient relic from Lebanon that New York's leading art museum suspects may have been stolen during the Lebanese civil war.

Manhattan prosecutors have impounded the bull's head and are seeking to return it to Lebanon. But husband-and-wife art collectors from Colorado have filed their own lawsuit, seeking the relic be returned to them.

An Indonesian man who grew marijuana to ease the pain of his seriously-ill wife was sentenced to eight months in prison on Wednesday, despite an outcry from right groups and activists.