New York public schools will add two Muslim holidays to their vacation calendars, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday, a promise he made during his election campaign.  

Two of the most sacred holidays in the Islamic calendar, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, will be observed. 

Egypt's state-sponsored Islamic authority warned women Wednesday against marrying fighters from the Islamic State group online, saying such unions would push them into a "circle of terrorism."

Dar al-Ifta, the body that issues rulings on Islamic sharia law, said it made the warning after noticing several IS calls on social networks for girls to marry its jihadists "through video conferences."

In one of its most complex and ambitious exhibitions, the Museum of Modern Art has designed a career retrospective on Bjork that probes the question -- just how does one put music on a wall?

The New York institution hopes that its approach not only does justice to the wildly experimental Icelandic singer but also provides a model for other museums through its fluid synthesis of various media forms and its priority on making the audience feel connected.

More than 140 ceramics by Pablo Picasso, many rarely seen in public, are the star turn at a month-long festival in Washington celebrating Spanish and Portuguese culture that opened Tuesday.

The Iberian Mix "remix" at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, running through March 24, gives Americans a window on modern and contemporary dance, theater, music, film, food and art from the Iberian peninsula.

They have taken the dubious art of the selfie to a whole new level.

But now -- in what will be a relief to some and derided by others -- Washington's top museums say selfie sticks are banned, in a growing trend among visitor centers in the United States to outlaw the devices.

More than three decades of war have damaged Afghanistan's once-thriving carpet industry, but weavers are tapping into the bloody past to boost their fortunes with "war rugs" depicting guns, tanks and warplanes.

On Chicken Street, the most famous street in Afghanistan during the "hippie trail" tourist days of the late 60s and 70s and still the place to come for souvenirs, some of the carpets in the shops look like pages of the country's wartorn history.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen says he has found the Japanese Navy's biggest warship at the bottom of the sea in the Philippines, 70 years after U.S. forces sank it.

Allen posted a photo on Twitter on Tuesday of the World War II battleship Musashi's rusty bow, which bore the Japanese empire's Chrysanthemum seal.

Norway's influential Nobel Peace Prize committee Tuesday demoted its controversial chairman Thorbjoern Thagland in a move unprecedented in the history of the award.

The committee, which said the former Norwegian prime minister would remain as a committee member, gave no reason for its decision.

Trains chug around Yangon's circular railway at a stately pace barely faster than a brisk walk, but this creaking relic of colonial times is at the heart of plans for a public transport revolution in the traffic-choked metropolis.

Rush hour spills a throng of passengers towards Kyi Kyi Win's cigarette stand at a downtown station, and the tobacconist says she has seen more commuters using the trains since changes to the city's long-neglected network were introduced. 

British conductor Simon Rattle is moving back to his home country as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra following news of his departure from the Berlin Philharmonic.

The 60-year-old, considered one of the greatest conductors in the world by critics, will take up the baton at the LSO in 2017, the orchestra said Tuesday, following in the footsteps of figures including Andre Previn and Valery Gergiev.