One of Britain's biggest colleges on Friday dropped a ban on Muslim face veils after thousands of people signed a petition against the rule.

Birmingham Metropolitan College said on Facebook it would change its policy to allow "individuals to wear specific items of personal clothing to reflect their cultural values".

A 12-year-old Indian rollerskating fanatic and a skateboarding goat were among the record-breakers who made it into the 2014 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, released on Thursday.

Schoolboy Rohan Kokane, from the western Indian city of Belgaum, won his place in the famous book as the Lowest Limbo Skater, rollerskating beneath a height of just 25 centimetres (10 inches) over a distance of 10 metres (33 feet).

The killing of Bulgarian dissident Georgy Markov with a poison-tipped umbrella on a London bridge in 1978 was like an episode from the pages of a Cold War spy novel.

But this was not fiction. And now, 35 years later, Bulgarian investigators are closing the book on their probe, even though Markov's cousin says he knows who the killer was -- and where he lives.

Cobwebs cover its furniture and its rooms are long deserted, but a crumbling house in northern Myanmar is at the centre of a conservation battle by locals who say it was once home to George Orwell.

The remote trading post of Katha on the banks of the Irrawaddy -- and the house lived in by Orwell in the 1920s -- were immortalized in the acclaimed British author's first novel, "Burmese Days".

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.