France's leading Muslim body said Tuesday it would create a permit to preach for imams in a bid to root out extremists, as well as a new religious body to fight back against jihadist propaganda.

Anouar Kbibech, president of the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM), said the country's imams should be given a certificate -- "like a driving license" -- that ensured they promoted a "tolerant and open Islam."

A Chinese lesbian on Tuesday took the government to court over textbooks describing homosexuality as a "psychological disorder", a landmark case in a country where discrimination remains common.

Qiu Bai, 21, a student at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, brought the action against the ministry of education, demanding that it give her details of how it approved materials and how they could be changed.

A haunting peal reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands reverberates across Pakistan's inhospitable Cholistan desert as the nation's first camel-mounted military bagpipe band marches, noses in the air.

With scarlet and gold uniforms in sharp contrast to the dichromatic landscape of beige and green, the camels' tails switch in perfect rhythm.

Egypt said Monday it will conduct more tests this week in search of a hidden chamber in King Tutankhamun's tomb that a British archaeologist believes may be the burial place of Queen Nefertiti.

Archaeologists have never discovered the mummy of the legendary beauty, but renowned British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves said in a recent study that her tomb could be in a secret chamber adjoining Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of Kings in Luxor in southern Egypt.

President Ollanta Humala on Sunday issued legal measures aimed at ending violence against women, arguing that full respect for them was essential for a truly democratic society.

In a ceremony before hundreds of women, Humala, with his wife Nadine Heredia by his side, asked Peruvians to end cultural practices that often condone domestic violence against women.

Some of the world's most expensive and rarely seen modern art, including works by the Americans Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, went on display Saturday in a major exhibition in Iran.

They are part of a collection bought in the 1970s by dealers acting for Farah, the wife of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who fled into exile in 1979, heralding the country's Islamic revolution later that year.

A pair of stolen N.C. Wyeth paintings worth up to $500,000 apiece have been recovered and will be displayed in Maine along with four other stolen paintings recouped nearly a year ago in California, officials said Thursday.

The two paintings were recovered last month when a third party surrendered them to a retired FBI agent in the Boston area, Harold Shaw, special agent in charge of the bureau's Boston field office, told reporters at the Portland Museum of Art, where the paintings were on display. No additional arrests have been made, and the investigation is continuing, he said.

Russia plans to unveil a bronze "Wall of Grief" in Moscow next year in its first tangible condemnation of Stalin-era crimes but critics accuse the government of playing a double game.

The national memorial, backed by President Vladimir Putin, comes as authorities play down the horrors of Stalin's purges and revive some of the Soviet Union's ideology and traditions.

US literary great Ernest Hemingway's tender and joyful memoir of 1920s Paris, "A Moveable Feast", has enjoyed a surge in sales since last week's terror attacks in the French capital.

The author of such acclaimed novels as "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "The Old Man and the Sea" spent time in Paris as a young man honing his writing skills and chronicling the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I.

The family of an Israeli transgender woman is seeking to stop the cremation of her body after her suicide, arguing it offends their ultra-Orthodox beliefs even though it was specified in her will.

The legal battle has highlighted the uneasy relationship between Israel's commitment to gay rights, rare in the Middle East, and its ultra-Orthodox Jews, who abide by a strict religious lifestyle.