The sale of late British leader Margaret Thatcher's possessions has raised £3.3 million (4.5 million euros, $5 million), auction house Christie's said on Tuesday.

A model of an American bald eagle given to Thatcher by close ally and former US president Ronald Reagan fetched the highest price for an individual item at £266,500 after a flurry of bidding in person, online and by phone.

Iran has impounded tens of thousands of cars since March because women inside the vehicles had not properly covered their hair with a headscarf, Tehran's traffic police said Tuesday.

"Over the past eight months, more than 40,000 cases of bad hijab (headscarf) have been dealt with," said Brigadier General Teymour Hosseini, quoted by ISNA news agency.

A U.S. Army captain who is Sikh has been granted a rare -- albeit temporary -- waiver letting him keep his beard and wear a turban while serving, his representatives said Monday.

The case of Captain Simratpal Singh comes nearly two years after the Pentagon loosened a requirement for soldiers to be "clean-cut."

The election of at least 20 women to local councils in Saudi Arabia for the first time could indirectly lead to longer term reforms in discriminatory policies, activists said Monday.

They said Saturday's vote in the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom is a step towards improving the rights of the Gulf nation's roughly 10 million females.

A Tunisian court sentenced six students to three years in jail each on charges of homosexuality in a judgment condemned by rights activists, their lawyer said on Monday.

The court in Kairouan last week handed down the maximum term under a controversial article of the criminal code that criminalizes sex between two males, Boutheina Karkni said.

The tattooed young Iranian initially sparked wonder and some envy when pictures of him with scantily-clad, heavily made-up women, often more than one at a time, went viral.

In a morally conservative country, the obvious breach of a female dress code was one thing. The compromising poses the 14 women were captured in was another.

Street artist Banksy has taken on the migrant crisis in a new mural at a migrant camp in France.

The elusive graffiti artist has depicted the late Apple guru Steve Jobs — whose biological father was from Syria — carrying a black garbage bag and an early model of the Macintosh computer.

Billions of dollars in gold and silver from an 18th century shipwreck have left Spain and former colony Colombia at odds over who rightfully owns the loot.

The disagreement is over the "San Jose," an treasure ship wreck that Colombia located recently off the coast of Cartagena de Indias, its old Caribbean port city.

Selling everything from underwear to dried fruit to teacups, tiny glass-windowed kiosks packed with goods line Moscow's network of long, gloomy pedestrian underpasses.

But now the city's government has replaced the old, haphazardly-built kiosks with new purpose-built units and is trying to turn the underpasses into smarter shopping arcades for busy Muscovites.

Jews can secure eternal salvation without converting to Christianity, senior Catholic theologians say in a report published Thursday in the latest refinement of their stance on a vexed theological issue.

Addressing a question that has long blighted relations between the two faiths, the report also unequivocally states that the Church should not actively seek to convert Jews to Christianity, echoing the stance outlined by former Pope Benedict XVI in a 2011 book.