Catalans rebelling against plans to reform teaching of their language in schools planned street protests Thursday, the latest outpouring of tension between the region and the Spanish government.

Associations organizing the demonstration, planned for 1700 GMT in Barcelona, branded the reform an attack on the Catalan cultural identity, which pre-dates the formation of the modern Spanish state.

Air raid sirens sounded in the Chinese city of Nanjing Thursday, 75 years after Japanese soldiers embarked on mass killing and rape, with the Asian giants' ties riven over a territorial row.

The two countries -- the world's second- and third-largest economies -- have extensive trade and business links, but the weight of Japan's wartime atrocities still bears heavily on their relationship.

Israeli and Jewish officials in Denmark on Wednesday warned Jews to avoid openly wearing religious symbols and dress when moving about Copenhagen amid rising anti-Israeli sentiment.

"We advise Israelis who come to Denmark and want to go to the synagogue to wait to don their skull caps until they enter the building and not to wear them in the street, irrespective of whether the areas they are visiting are seen as being safe," Israel's ambassador to Denmark, Arthur Avnon, told AFP.

The End Of The World As We Know It -- TEOTWAWKI -- is littered with predictions that didn't quite pan out.

Just ask the folks who are still chewing through the food they stashed away at the time of the Killer Blob scare four years ago.

Russia President Vladimir Putin came under criticism from rights activists on Tuesday after he compared Vladimir Lenin's embalmed corpse to the holy relics of Christian saints.

In a Monday speech before a group of supporters, Putin spoke against the idea of removing Lenin's mausoleum from Red Square in Moscow where his corpse is housed.

Despite living much of their lives behind a veil, some Afghan women are feeling pressure to conform to ideals of female beauty and are lining up for cosmetic surgery at a handful of clinics in Kabul.

A few years ago, most operations would have been to repair war wounds or scars from family violence, acid attacks or attempts at self-immolation by women driven to despair by hard times in a male-dominated society.

With the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam closed for renovations, the world's second-largest collection of the tortured Dutch master's work is stepping into the limelight.

The lesser-known Kroeller-Mueller museum in the eastern Netherlands has revamped the layout of its central rooms, giving more space and focus to many of its top works.

Believers of the Mayan calendar prediction that the world will end on December 21 have flooded into a small village in western Turkey, near the ancient Greek city of Ephesus.

Some New Age spiritualists are convinced of a December 21 "doomsday" foretold by Mayan hieroglyphs -- at least according to some interpretations.

China's "most inclusive" dictionary is set to expand by nearly a third to nearly half a million entries across 25 volumes, state media reported on Tuesday.

It will take seven years to fully revise the Hanyu Da Cidian, first published in 1986, for its second edition, the state news agency Xinhua said, with the first volume due to be released in 2015.

Condemned as heretics, a community of around 200 Shiite Muslims have for months lived as pariahs in a sports hall, driven from their Indonesian village after a deadly clash with Sunnis.

In August, a mob of hundreds armed with sickles and swords hacked a Shiite man to death and torched more than 30 houses, forcing villagers to seek refuge at the sports hall.