Thai officials armed with a court order on Monday resumed the removal of tigers from a controversial temple which attracts tourists as a petting zoo, but stands accused of selling off the big cats for slaughter.

On Monday afternoon one tiger was tranquilized and carried away on a stretcher, while another was lured into a cage to be relocated from the Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua temple, according to an AFP photographer at the scene.

Germany recorded bigger numbers of people moving from western states to eastern ones for the first time since reunification in 2014, data published Monday showed.

Following reunification in 1990, around 200,000 east Germans flooded to the west each year in search of jobs and better opportunities.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday that family planning and contraception were not for Muslim families, in his latest comments promoting population growth that have angered women's activists.

France's Jewish community, the largest in Europe, chose a Sephardi Jew as its leader Sunday for the first time in half a century.

Clergymen should make themselves available to their flocks day and night instead of keeping visiting hours and relaxing once the church doors close, Pope Francis said Sunday.

A Chinese detergent maker has apologized for an advertisement which shows a black man stuffed into a washing machine and transformed into a fair-skinned Asian, just a day after dismissing critics as too sensitive.

Gripping a monkey-faced chess piece, Thein Zaw swipes his hand across the chequerboard and topples an advancing demon, demonstrating an ancient form of the game that Myanmar traditionalists are battling to revive.

Sittuyin, as Myanmar's unique chess is called, is similar to the modern game but has distinctive pieces as well as moves that echo a time when warriors used it to fine tune real fighting strategies.

In high-rise, high-priced Hong Kong, even millionaires don't always have room to store their fine wine collection at home, but a converted British war bunker offers space-crunched oenophiles the perfect solution.

Built by Her Majesty's government in the 1930s to hold munitions, the "Little Hong Kong" bunker complex was the last Allied position to fall to the invading Japanese on 27 December 1941 -- two days after the surrender of the British governor.

In a Silicon Valley culture known for brilliant ideas boiling up in coffee shops, Gaurav Chawla is pouring his heart into chai.

Chawla was on a break from his job as an engineering manager at San Francisco-based cloud-computing star Salesforce when he began lamenting how tough it was to find a cup of chai as good as he makes it at home.

French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will on Sunday stand shoulder to shoulder on the battlefield of Verdun to remember those killed 100 years ago in one of the bloodiest episodes of World War I.

To mark the centenary, Hollande and Merkel will lay wreaths at cemeteries holding the dead of both sides in the northeast French town.