The Afghan government has recommended legal action against two TV channels for allegedly broadcasting scantily dressed women and disseminating immorality, officials said Wednesday.

A ministry of information and culture official said stations Saba, which means dawn, and Setara, which means star -- were guilty of broadcasting songs, in which "there was lots of nudity".

Growing tensions and fears of separatism prompted communist Bulgaria to orchestrate an ethnic purge against its Turkish minority in 1989, newly published archive documents showed this week.

On May 29, 1989, Bulgaria opened its Iron Curtain border with Turkey -- sealed until then -- and urged Ankara to follow suit and accept part of its 750,000-strong Turkish minority.

The Telecommunications Ministry announced on Wednesday the production of a stamp in honor of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Lebanon.

The endeavor, launched in cooperation with LibanPost, will kick off on Saturday.

A group of 170 Hindus from Pakistan who travelled to India on pilgrim visas have said they will not return home due to alleged persecution in the Islamic republic.

Officials in the western Indian state of Rajasthan have reported an increase in Hindu refugees, but Pakistani authorities say the numbers are exaggerated and those who leave are economic migrants seeking better jobs.

Andy Warhol wasn't just prolific himself, but inspired the whole field of contemporary art, and now an exhibit opening at New York's Met traces that influence across half a century.

"Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years" opens Wednesday until the end of the year and is being presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the first to examine the king of Pop Art's wide-ranging legacy.

A box of bric-a-brac purchased for several dollars at a Virginia flea market contained an unlikely treasure: a painting by French Impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The canvas, which shows a scene along the Seine River titled "Paysage Bords de Seine," is scheduled to be auctioned later this month by the Potomack Company, an auction house in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC.

Swaziland is poor in resources, so King Mswati III is courting investors with his kingdom's vast cultural traditions as he tries to lift the nation out of an economic crisis.

Every year the nation's international trade fair coincides with the famous reed dance, a massive showcase of local culture in which tens of thousands of young women swarm across the kingdom to dance bare-breasted in beaded mini-skirts and colorful pompoms for the king at his royal palace.

He speaks with a German accent and prefers coffee to Sudan's favourite, tea, but three decades after last setting foot in his ancestral home Sudan, Arab author Tarek Eltayeb has returned on a voyage of discovery.

Eltayeb, 52, has published 10 books including two novels that chronicle the immigrant experience which shaped his own lif.

Record rainfall, cold snaps, hail storms and rampant vine disease: the conditions for making wine in large parts of France and in England have rarely been as tough as they have been this year.

Yet winemakers on both sides of the Channel are defiantly optimistic that 2012 could still turn out to be a vintage to remember for its quality as well as for the financially devastating impact of low yields.

Leaders of Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Muslim and Jewish communities Sunday made a pressing call for peace from Bosnia which was the scene of the worst atrocities committed in Europe since World War II.

Stressing the "commitment of Serb people to the strengthening of peace" Serb Orthodox Church Patriarch Irinej said he wished that the future of peoples in the Balkans be "freed from the tragic and painful experiences of the past."