Muslims across Indonesia began celebrating the holy month of Ramadan Wednesday, with hardliners vowing to raid "sinful" bars and police steamrolling a mountain of alcohol and porn amid rising intolerance.

Islam's holiest month is used by hardliners in Indonesia as an opportunity to attack nightclubs, bars and shops that openly sell alcohol, the consumption of which is against Islamic law.

French Muslims were thrown into confusion Tuesday as the country's top Islamic body and officials at the leading mosque in Paris differed over the start date of the holy month of Ramadan.

While the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), the official Islamic representative body, was insisting that Ramadan had started on Tuesday, the theological council at the Great Mosque of Paris said it would not start until Wednesday, when many Arab countries are due to begin the observance.

The Church of England voted Monday to restart the process that would lead to ordaining women bishops after traditionalists blocked the idea last year, plunging the church into turmoil.

The General Synod, the governing body of England's state church, will consider the draft measures in November with the aim of securing final approval for women bishops in 2015.

"It's a sense of home," German master baker Karl-Dietmar Plentz muses, dipping his hands into a tray of flour and letting it run through his fingers as 26 types of bread bake in the ovens of his 136-year-old family business.

Behind him a worker deftly kneads two pieces of dough into identical loaves, one in each hand, as they roll off a cutting machine. They belong to a batch of 'potato bread', one of Plentz's specialties that is still partly made the way his grandfather did it.

Eight thousand people joined the annual Gay Pride parade in Budapest on Saturday, organizers said, marking the biggest participation in the event's 16-year history.

The parade, which in recent years has been disrupted by far-right protesters, took place without any violent incidents, although about 200 far-right nationalists shouted insults at participants.

Clad in an authentic Hungarian blue vest, Suto Levente Lehel, a 14th-generation family furniture-maker and wood artisan from Transylvania, shows off his carefully carved cabinets and furnishings to passers-by on the National Mall.

"I take this chisel and carve and then use paint to bring the piece to life," Lehel explains to visitors.

Not your usual mothballed folk festival, a songfest more than a century old with a choir of thousands enjoys near mythical status for the role it played in little Latvia's battle for freedom.

The weeklong Latvian Song and Dance Celebration culminates Sunday when 12,000 people deliver old folk songs in pitch-perfect unison at a forest amphitheatre in Riga.

Retirement is not traditionally on the cards for queens, kings or popes, but a string of abdications in recent months, some unprecedented, show many are choosing to step aside instead of labouring on until death.

Belgian King Albert, 79, became the latest to announce he will abdicate his throne, a little over a week after the emir of Qatar Hamad ben Khalifa Al Thani stepped down in favour of his son -- a first for an Arab country.

A lizard dipped in wine may not seem like an obvious asthma remedy, but as Cambodian traditional healers strive to turn their ancient wisdom into a professional industry such treatments are finding their way into the classroom.

For generations, the secrets of "Kru Khmer" traditional remedies have been passed down by word of mouth -- often from father to son -- with each expert tweaking the methods along the way.

Extravagant displays of Independence Day fireworks lit up the skies around the United States, including 19 single bursts in Arizona to remember the firefighters killed in a wildfire, the Statue of Liberty reopened eight months after it was shuttered by Superstorm Sandy, and President Obama urged citizens to live up to the words of the Declaration of Independence.

Four barges carrying 40,000 shells on the Hudson River on Thursday night unleashed a barrage of brilliant reds, whites and blues — some in shapes and smiley faces — as spectators marveled at the classic New York over-the-top fireworks display, snapping videos and pictures on their phones.