The Franciscan friar who brought Christianity to California in the 18th century is on track for sainthood, but for Native Americans, his legacy is anything but holy.

Junipero Serra founded the first nine of what would become 21 Spanish missions stretching from San Diego to San Francisco, giving the Roman Catholic Church a firm foothold in what was then called New Spain.

It's Valentine's Day in the world's most romantic capital and as some couples cosy up in restaurants around Paris, others furtively slip through a purple tinted door for a night of sexual titillation at a libertine nightclub.

One by one accountants, engineers, businessmen and parents are buzzed into the discreet club on the banks of a Parisian canal, where gently flickering lights play across an interior decorated in warm, sensual reds and violets.

An albino toddler has been kidnapped in northern Tanzania, police said late Monday, raising fears he may be killed and his body parts used for witchcraft.

Unknown attackers broke into the house and slashed the child's mother with machetes before snatching the one-and-half-year-old boy in the northern Tanzanian district of Chato late on Saturday.

A Dali-style homage to Rio ahead of the city's 450th birthday, parachutists landing on the piste and a polemic on the funding of an elite samba school paying tribute to Africa marked Monday's carnival parade.

There were highlights aplenty as some 30,000 participants from the final six elite schools strutted down the Sapucai Avenue at a Sambadrome packed with 72,000 flagwaving and gyrating people of all ages.  

It's the drink that, more than any lover, drove a generation of artists, from Van Gogh to Oscar Wilde and Verlaine, to distraction. 

Absinthe was their muse, their creative rocket fuel, but the fabled "fee verte" (green fairy), which they venerated in painting and prose, was also their ruin. That was the theory, at least, when France banned the green-tinted liquor during World War 1, claiming it drove drinkers insane.

Sheep or goat?

China's coming lunar new year has stirred a debate over which zodiac creature is the correct one -- but Chinese folklorists dismiss the fixation on animals as missing the point.

Hard-to-pronounce British place names are getting a Mandarin makeover with sometimes surprising results, Britain's tourism agency said on Monday as part of a campaign to encourage more Chinese tourists.

VisitBritain released 101 new suggested names for famous landmarks provided by the Chinese public through online polling on social media.

Forty years after the end of the Vietnam war, U.S. bombs dropped along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos have become expensive jewelry worn by American fashionistas.

Delicate bracelets encrusted with diamonds, bronze pendants, necklaces and drop earrings -- all made from ordnance left over from America's deadliest war -- are on display on the sidelines of New York Fashion Week.

When she sways to the sensual beat of samba, Megumi Kudo also heals the wounds in her mother's heart from a huge earthquake that shattered their home city in Japan 20 years ago.

This year's festive menu for the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro has special poignancy for the Kudos, with daughter Megumi set to perform as a "passista" dancer with the famed Salgueiro school this weekend, continuing a tradition that has now spanned two generations.

The Mumbai neighborhood made famous by the film "Slumdog Millionaire" is set to host its first "biennale", aiming to promote health through creativity, although it will be very different to some of the world's grander art fairs.

The three-week festival, opening Sunday, will showcase works created by residents of Dharavi, the densely populated settlement in the heart of India's financial capital that is known as one of Asia's biggest slums.