China has banned civil servants, students and teachers in its mainly Muslim Xinjiang region from fasting during Ramadan and ordered restaurants to stay open, official websites showed as the holy month began on Thursday.

Most Muslims are required to fast from dawn to dusk during the month but China's ruling Communist party is officially atheist and for years has restricted the practice in Xinjiang, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur minority.

World-renowned Indian architect Charles Correa has died at the age of 84 after a short illness, an industry group said Wednesday.

Correa, who designed a number of landmark buildings in India including a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, died in hospital in the western Indian city of Mumbai late on Tuesday.

After decades of quietly selling fruit and vegetables, a family-run Turkish grocery shop has become the unlikely flashpoint in a Berlin culture war pitting a neighborhood against property developers.

No-one is more surprised than its owner, Ahmet Caliskan, 55, who received an eviction notice in March but has since been heartened by an outpouring of support from the people of his colorful, bohemian district of Kreuzberg.

South Korean rights activists on Wednesday celebrated a court's decision to overturn a ban on a gay pride parade in Seoul, but conservative Christians denounced the ruling as encouraging "evil" behavior.

Police had cited public safety concerns and traffic disruption as the reasons behind the ban imposed last month, but the Seoul Administrative Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of the parade. 

A Chinese university has earned comparisons with Harry Potter's Hogwarts due to its bizarre castle campus, but local traditions supplied the magic at a Confucian-style ceremony for its degree graduates.

The gigantic grey towers, stone walls and turrets of the Hebei Academy of Fine Arts' castle complex dominate surrounding wheat fields near Xinle city in northern China.

A lone Syrian winery behind "the world's most harrowing wine to produce" is seeking to break into new markets at the world's leading wine show, Vinexpo, this week.

"I haven't been able to visit the vineyard in four years since the conflict began," said Sandro Johnny Saade, one of two Lebanese-Syrian brothers who set up the Domaine de Bargylus domain near Latakia on Syria's north coast in 2003.

Two hundred years after the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon is still under attack in Britain, where the image persists of a military genius consumed by a fanaticism comparable with Hitler or Stalin.

The Emperor of French revolutionaries and regicides continues to strike fear in his neighbors across the Channel, long after his death on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena, according to British historian and author Andrew Roberts.

Pakistan pledged to crack down on religious seminaries suspected of fostering extremism following a Taliban school massacre in December that left more than 130 children dead, but the move faces stiff resistance from conservatives.

Amid a wave of outrage after the attack at the school in the northwestern city of Peshawar, the government announced a "National Action Plan" to fight back against the militants.

The makers of a Thai reality television show have held an apologetic mountaintop prayer ritual after viewers accused them of angering sacred spirits during their last episode.

"Thailand's Got Talent", which is based on the hugely successful British franchise, found itself in hot water after an episode aired Friday.

British researchers on Monday began collecting the DNA of residents from Normandy in northern France in search of Viking heritage, but the project has raised concerns amongst some local anti-racism activists.

Around a hundred volunteers from the Cotentin Peninsula area are giving DNA samples to academics at the University of Leicester, who are trying to find descendants of the Vikings who invaded what is now Normandy in the 9th century.