Women will be allowed to become bishops in Anglican churches in Wales following a vote on Thursday, a decision that puts pressure on the Church of England which has rejected such a move.

Campaigners called the move long overdue, arguing the exclusion of women from the top roles made the church less relevant in the modern world.

Russia on Thursday said it was carrying out raids as part of a probe into the alleged embezzlement of $1.5 million of state funding allocated for refitting Saint Petersburg's celebrated Hermitage museum.

The interior ministry said its investigators were probing the embezzlement of 50 million rubles ($1.5 million, 1.1 million euros) from the federal budget intended for reconstruction work at the museum renowned for its priceless collection of Western art.

French police are investigating an apparent scam involving fake tickets for the Louvre museum in Paris after top-quality counterfeits were found in the hands of Chinese tourists, museum and judicial officials said Wednesday.

The probe was launched after agents found false tickets being used on several occasions last month by Chinese tourists and tour guides, a source at the Louvre -- one of the world's largest and most-visited museums -- told Agence France Presse.

Chinese archaeologists have discovered the tomb of a 7th-century female politician who was one of the most powerful women in the country's ancient history, local media said on Thursday.

Shangguan Wan'er -- who lived from 664 to 710 in the Tang dynasty -- was a trusted aide to China's first female emperor Wu Zetian, and married to Wu's son, while having relationships with both the empress's lover and her nephew.

Near Iraq's northernmost point, close to Turkey and Iran, a national park of snow-capped peaks and forested valleys is drawing tourists and researchers keen to explore a hardly touched land.

But this region of outstanding natural beauty has also been scarred by war, and local officials are grappling with the problem of minefields left over from years of conflict.

Green and left-wing lawmakers on Wednesday nominated U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden for the European Parliament's prestigious Sakharov human rights prize.

Snowden, who has sought asylum in Russia, "deserves to be honored for shedding light on the systematic infringements of civil liberties by U.S. and European secret services," leaders of the parliament's Greens group Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rebecca Harms said in a statement.

Officials in Quebec Tuesday presented their controversial bid to ban religious apparel -- including headscarves, turbans and yarmulkes -- on public sector workers, part of an overhaul to the Canadian province's "Charter of Values."

The reforms are a response to the "crisis of religious accommodation" granted to ethnic minorities that has "created tensions between Quebecers of different backgrounds and faiths," the minister in charge of the issue, Bernard Drainville, said at a press conference.

In this day of multiplexes and 3-D projection, the Chuan Mei theater in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan is a reminder of the way movie-going used to be.

Instead of computer-generated tickets and plush-sofa-like seats, patrons are given hand-stamped pieces of paper indicating the time of their performance and seated on simple metal chairs.

Poland's Muslim community on Tuesday said a controversial nationwide ban on halal and kosher slaughter, which has spurred intense debate at home and abroad, was invalid under European law.

The EU directive "applies in Poland and in this case it supersedes national law," Poland's top Muslim leader, Mufti Tomasz Miskiewicz, said, quoting an expert legal analysis commissioned by the Muslim community and the meat industry.

The glory of the male form is the focus of Paris's Musee d'Orsay program this autumn, with hundreds of naked men waiting to adorn its illustrious walls: all in the name of art, of course.

The "Masculin/Masculin" exhibition will exhibit 200 works about male nudes from as far back as 1800, and the art crowd in the French capital is already buzzing about the "out of favour" male physique finally going on show in one of the world's greatest museums.