A Syrian filmmaker close to the opposition who made a film about a notorious regime prison has been stabbed by an unknown assailant in Istanbul, supporters and Syrian groups said Wednesday.

Muhammad Bayazid was stabbed on Tuesday while on his way to a meeting, according to an account posted on the filmmaker's official Facebook page by a friend who witnessed the attack.

After two rounds of voting to pick the next head of the U.N.'s troubled cultural body, Qatari diplomat Hamad bin Abdulaziz al-Kawari has emerged as the leading contender.

It has been buffeted by the pendulum swing of domestic politics and suffered looting that left it without some of its most precious items.

The final poems of Leonard Cohen, completed days before the legendary songwriter died, will be published in an anthology next year, his estate announced late Friday.

Nuclear disarmament group ICAN won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for its decade-long campaign to rid the world of the atomic bomb as nuclear-fuelled crises swirl over North Korea and Iran.

"The organisation is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons," said Norway's Nobel committee president Berit Reiss-Andersen.

Brazil is becoming an increasingly dangerous place for transgender people but four popular singers are among those who think they can change the tune.

According to the rights group Transgender Europe, Brazil topped a list of 33 countries for trans killings between October 2015 and September 2016, accounting for 123 out of a worldwide count of 295.

British author Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his novel "The Remains of the Day" and whose emotional uprooting from his native Japan has left an indelible stamp on his work, won the 2017 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday.

A U.S. congressman who sponsored legislation criminalizing late-term abortion announced Wednesday he will not seek re-election next year, after a report revealed he urged his mistress to have an abortion.

"After discussions with my family and staff, I have come to the decision that I will not seek reelection to Congress at the end of my current term," House Republican Tim Murphy, who has been popular with members of the pro-life movement, said in a statement according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The board of the U.N.'s cultural body on Wednesday began vetting eight candidates vying to head an organization accused of bias in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and foot-dragging on reforms.

A crowd of ministers and high-level government officials and experts came Wednesday to the ESCWA headquarters in Beirut to take part in the 8th Session of the ESCWA Committee on Women.

United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ESCWA Mohamed Ali Al-Hakim said: "Even as we welcome the positive developments with regard to guaranteeing equality and social justice in Arab societies and reforms aimed at enhancing women’s rights and their participation in community building, we should not overlook the tremendous challenges facing our region. Arab countries are racked by all manner of violence and conflicts that, aside from shattering the peace, are threatening all that has been achieved in terms of social development and progress. One country in particular, Palestine, has suffered under, and continues to endure, decades of occupation.”