An international rights group said Tuesday that Afghan President Hamid Karzai should refuse to sign a law passed by parliament that would deny women protection from domestic violence and forced marriage.

Afghanistan's parliament, a two-chamber house dominated by conservative clerics and former Islamist warlords, passed a "criminal procedure law" last year which experts say contains articles that deny women legal protections.

Portugal is hoping a master of surrealism can help taxpayers recoup some of the millions they lost rescuing a failed bank.

The government is selling 85 works by Spanish artist Joan Miro that became public property when Banco Portugues de Negocios was nationalized in 2008.

Hooves clash in mid-air, a stallion bites his opponent while delighted spectators cheer wildly -- in southern China some saw in the Year of the Horse by watching the animals fight.

For the residents of Tiantou, a remote village in the Guangxi region, the 500-year-old tradition which pits male horses against each other in a fight over a female was the only way to kick off the Lunar New Year.

The striking, skeletal forms of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti are juxtaposed with corpulent neo-classical and baroque Italian masterpieces in a new exhibition in Rome exploring the evocative power of the human body.

Forty Giacometti gems, including his famous spindly "Walking Man" in bronze, have been scattered around the permanent collection at the Villa Borghese Gallery in the Italian capital, dotted in among classics such as Bernini's "David" or Canova's "Pauline Borghese".

Spike Jonze's "Her" and Billy Ray's "Captain Phillips" have earned top screenplay honors from the Writers Guild of America.

Winning the prize for original screenplay on Saturday was "Her," Jonze's futuristic exploration of a man's relationship with his computer, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson as the voice of an operating system.

It's late afternoon at the e-library in North Korea's Kim Il Sung University, where row after row of smartly dressed students sit quietly, their faces bathed in the glow of computer displays as they surf the Internet. On the surface, it's a familiar-seeming scene, which is exactly why officials are offering it up for a look.

North Korea is literally off the charts regarding Internet freedoms. There essentially aren't any. But the country is increasingly online. Though it deliberately and meticulously keeps its people isolated and in the dark about the outside world, it knows it must enter the information age to survive in the global economy.

A century after it was built, the Cervantes theater in Tangiers, once a symbol of the famed Moroccan city's cultural vibrancy, is derelict and risks disappearing altogether, eclipsed by flashy new developments.

The 1,400-seat playhouse, just a short distance from the old port, is a masterpiece of early 20th-century Spanish architecture in the once-international city that in its heyday hosted a wealth of colorful characters and communities.

Thousands of pro-choice campaigners converged on the Spanish capital Saturday to voice their opposition to a government plan to restrict access to abortion in the mainly Catholic country.

Demonstrators shouting slogans and carrying banners that read "It's my right, It's my life" crowded around a Madrid station to greet a "freedom train" of activists from northern Spain for the country's first major protest against the plan.

Mary Scanlon had no idea a $3 purchase from a Goodwill resale store in Phoenix would turn out to be a rare link to the civil rights movement's most revered leader.

Last April, Scanlon was at the thrift store when she spotted a pile of 35 vintage reel-to-reel tapes, including one labeled with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s name. Despite the moldy and torn packaging, she snapped up all of them.

A glimmer of hope surfaced in the effort to keep the Houston Astrodome —the world's first multipurpose domed stadium — from being torn down with its addition this week to the National Register of Historic Places.

But the designation alone will not be enough to prevent the demolition of the so-called "Eighth Wonder of the World," according to officials.