The wedding season is in full swing in India, marking what should be the busiest time of year for the traditional brass bands that lead raucous processions announcing the arrival of the bridegroom to the neighborhood.

Dressed in faded military-style uniforms or long silken tunics and turbans, brass bands playing the latest Bollywood tunes have long been a must-have at any Indian wedding.

A struggle for women's rights is brewing within Israel's deeply conservative ultra-Orthodox community, where women, largely shut out of politics, are beginning to demand greater representation in the country's parliament.

More than 20 percent of Israeli lawmakers are female, but not one woman serves from the country's two ultra-Orthodox, or haredi, parties. In haredi communities, women are expected to manage a home, raise children and provide an income for the family, often while the husband studies Torah.

A Chinese city is attempting to force its eight million residents to memorize and recite a series of "socialist values," state-media reported Friday, with spot-checks to ensure conformity.

The central Chinese city of Wuhan is calling on "all residents to internalize" 12 "core socialist values," which are part of an ideological campaign by China's ruling Communist party, reported the Global Times tabloid.

Six decades after its first saint was murdered for his faith amid a bloody civil war, Myanmar's Catholic Church is stepping up calls for peace and religious tolerance as it celebrates its 500th anniversary. 

The grisly 1950 killing of Isidore Ngei Ko Lat, a religious teacher travelling with an Italian priest in the wild and war-ravaged eastern borderlands, had been almost forgotten after decades of military rule that severely restricted religious minorities in the mainly Buddhist country.

Iran has started censoring images posted on photo sharing app Instagram, removing content deemed "offensive" as part of a government project to screen social networking accounts, local media reported Thursday.

"The filtering of pages with immoral content began yesterday (Wednesday) evening on Instagram," the government daily Iran said.

The widely acclaimed movie "Selma" about the 1965 Civil Rights movement has disappointed at least one moviegoer: a leading historian of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The director of the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, which hosted a major civil rights summit this year that was headlined by four U.S. presidents, said the film that opens in theaters Thursday incorrectly portrays Johnson as an obstructionist to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Golden rays of tropical sunlight slant through the caved-in roof of Saint Thomas de Villanueva chapel, illuminating tiles graced by the faces of saints. Vandals shattered the stained-glass windows and scrawled their names on the thick walls during decades of frigid relations between the Roman Catholic Church and Cuba's communist government.

But a new chain-link fence surrounds the building, protecting it for a future that once seemed unimaginable.

A Chinese city has banned schools from holding Christmas events, state media reported on Thursday, highlighting official suspicions about the increasingly popular festival because of its foreign origins.

China's Christian population, currently estimated at around 60 million, is rapidly growing and Christmas is increasingly marked in the country ruled by the officially atheist Communist Party.

Many splendid pieces of Warsaw's architecture are gone or disfigured forever — victims of war and communism. But now some can be appreciated again — in miniature.

The fate of some of Warsaw's architectural gems reflects the tragic story of a city that went through years of war, then decades of communism in which buildings were torn down or neglected. Generations of residents have grown up unaware of the past splendor of the city once called the "Paris of the North."

A sculpture by U.S. pop artist Jeff Koons has been pulled from a retrospective of his work at the Center Pompidou in Paris after he was accused of ripping off a French clothing advert, the museum said Tuesday.

The multi-million-euro artwork depicts a large pig and a tiny penguin with the bust of a woman lying on snow in a fishnet top revealing her breasts.