Late one balmy spring night during Havana's 12th Biennial, young working-class men and women lounged on a stretch of sand dotted with folding chairs and umbrellas, an artificial beach created as an art installation on the capital's Malecon seaside promenade.

Meanwhile, at Sotheby's auction house in New York, the beach's 40-year-old creator, Arles del Rio, sold another piece featured at the last biennial for $11,875, more than 40 times the annual salary of an ordinary Cuban. The piece, titled "Fly Away," is made of chain-link fence with a hole in the shape of a jet, making it appear the plane flew right through it.

It's 6:00 am but the pickers are already working in Rose Valley, home to Bulgaria's centuries-old rose oil industry, providing a vital ingredient for the global perfumes industry -- and now with EU protection.

"We go out very early as the roses must be picked while there's still dew on them. Then the yield is highest," says Totka Hristova, one of an army of workers on the foot of the Balkan Mountains in the damp cool of the early morning.

Bangladesh must step up efforts to halt an "epidemic" of child marriage throughout the country where nearly one third of girls wed before they turn 15, a rights group said Tuesday.  

Although Bangladesh has cut poverty levels in recent years, numbers of child marriages remain huge, partly because of regular natural disasters that force already struggling families into greater desperation, Human Rights Watch said.

The French have their wine, the British have their tea. For Swedes, it's all about "fika", the de rigueur daily coffee break with a sweet nibble that is a social institution.

Sweden's almost 10 million inhabitants account for one percent of the world's coffee consumption, making it the second-biggest consumer behind Finland.

Mumbai's ornate horse-drawn carriages are nearing the end of the road after a court in the Indian city ruled them illegal, saying owners must wind up operations within a year.

The silver-colored Victorias -- styled on open carriages used during Queen Victoria's reign -- have been plying Mumbai's streets since British colonial times, and for years have been a tourist attraction.

It was the last thing they would see: a trapdoor opening in the floor of the Colosseum to unleash a snarling lion or bear, which sprang for the jugular as the crowds roared.

Where prisoners sentenced to a grisly death in ancient Rome's most barbaric playground once quaked in their sandals, today tourists can explore the cage that carried their killers thanks to a reconstruction in the ancient arena.

The art installation Ceci n’est pas un tapis was unveiled early in June during an open house held at Hadi Maktabi Gallery, in the presence of distinguished guests, art collectors, artists as well as friends and representatives of the media, a press release said.

A lecture was organized by Dr. Hadi Maktabi and the artist Niloufar Afnan, during which the guests were invited to view and handle the objects. The live talk guided them through the phases of the design process of the art installation.

Barefoot, with sweat pouring down their naked chests, 50 men slave in the depths of the Central African forest digging for diamonds in a sandy pit half the size of a football pitch.

They all share the same desperate hope -- that one day they will find a diamond that will change their miserable lives forever. 

Takashi Sakai is a healthy 41-year-old heterosexual man with a good job and a charming smile. But he's never had sex, one of a growing number of middle-aged Japanese men who are still virgins.

Sakai has never even had any kind of relationship with a woman, and says he has no idea how he might get to know one.

Threatened by disease and deforestation, the world's last isolated tribes in the Amazon are on a collision course with modern society like never before, experts say.

Entire cultures of people are the verge of being wiped out in Peru and Brazil, according to a series of papers published this week in the journal Science.