The British Museum said Thursday it is returning to Iraq a collection of 5,000-year-old looted antiquities seized from a London dealer shortly after the US-led invasion in 2003.

Lithuania's capital is pressing ahead with controversial plans for a raunchy international advertising campaign that refers to the city as the "G-spot of Europe", despite opposition from the church and central government.

Despite the law now being on their side, Zeineb, a Tunisian woman, and her Italian fiance Sergio cannot find a local notary to marry them unless he converts to Islam.

Israeli filmmaker Moshe Mizrahi, the country's only director of an Oscar-winning film, is to be buried in Tel Aviv on Monday following his death last week, friends and colleagues said.

A bell tolled Monday in Hiroshima as Japan marked 73 years since the world's first atomic bombing, with the city's mayor warning that rising nationalism worldwide threatened peace.

U.S. Ambassador Elizabeth Richard took part in the inauguration ceremony on Saturday organized by the Ministry of Culture marking the completion of an Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation project to rehabilitate the Eshmun Temple site, the U.S. embassy said in a press release.

The Thai boys freed from a flooded cave in a rescue bid that gripped the world left a Buddhist monastery Saturday, 11 days after ordaining as novice monks to honor a diver who died during the mission to save them.

The ordeal of the "Wild Boars" football team dominated global headlines as divers worked round the clock to extract the group from the flooded chambers and twisted, narrow passages of the Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand.

Tens of thousands of South Korean women staged a mass rally in Seoul Saturday to protest against spycam porn, urging tougher punishments for peeping Toms as anger over the growing scourge boils over. 

The head of Egypt's Coptic Church, Pope Tawadros II, has shut down his Facebook page, saying it was a "waste of time", after the church ordered monks off social media.

Russian police arrested 30 LGBT activists in Saint Petersburg on Saturday during a co-ordinated demonstration defending the rights of sexual minorities, a co-organizer told AFP after being taken into custody.

Around 60 people with placards calling for LGBT rights to be respected and waving rainbow-colored flags had gathered in the city center, said activist and co-organizer Aleksei Nazarov.