The number of Mexican children abducted, recruited by organized crime, mutilated and murdered has surged alarmingly, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said Monday.

The grim report from the OAS-affiliated rights body comes as Mexican authorities are scrambling amid a massive scandal over 43 college students missing and feared dead.

Islamic authorities in Malaysia are conducting a probe into a controversial "dog patting" event aimed at removing the stigma regarding men's best friend in the multi-ethnic Muslim-majority country.

The event, titled "I want to touch a dog" and held in a park on the outskirts of the capital Kuala Lumpur Sunday, encouraged patting dogs -- seen as unclean in Islam -- and reportedly drew hundreds of Muslims, raising the ire of religious leaders.

Queen guitarist Brian May on Monday launched an exhibition from his collection of Victorian 3D photographs, united for the first time with the famous paintings they tried to recreate.

Staged using props and actors, the "stereoscopic" cards were a British middle-class craze from the 1850s to the 1870s -- giving anyone with a viewer a three-dimensional glimpse of the era's celebrated but rarely seen artworks.

A controversial plan to make women wearing the burqa or niqab sit in separate glassed public enclosures at Australia's Parliament House due to security concerns was abandoned Monday after an outcry.

The backdown followed a decision on October 2 by Speaker Bronwyn Bishop and Senate President Stephen Parry to seat people wearing face coverings in areas normally reserved for noisy school children while visiting parliament.

A series of acid attacks on women in the historic Iranian city of Isfahan has raised fears and prompted rumors that the victims were targeted for not being properly veiled.

Police have declined to comment on a motive but suspects have been arrested and an investigation is ongoing, General Hossein Ashtari was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.

Pope Paul VI, who banned contraception but presided over Vatican reforms in the 1960s, moved one step away from sainthood on Sunday as Pope Francis beatified him.

The beatification mass took place in a sun-drenched St Peter's Square, with a red tapestry bearing an image of Paul VI smiling with open arms unfurled from the basilica.

An oil painting attributed to 17th-century Spanish master Diego Velazquez, found languishing in a back room of Yale University, has been returned to Spain for an exhibition in Valazquez's hometown Seville.

The large painting, "The Education of the Virgin Mary", has been on show since Wednesday at the Santa Clara arts centre as part of a show of the painter's early works made when he still lived in the southern Spanish city.

The US government announced Friday it would recognize same-sex marriages in seven additional states, after the Supreme Court declined to take up the debate.

A total of 26 of the 50 US states, and the capital Washington, now legally recognize gay and lesbian marriages, giving them the same legal rights and federal benefits as married heterosexual couples.

Warsaw's National Museum has added state-of-the art multimedia and installed new settings to enhance Europe's only exhibition of Christian-era wall paintings saved by the Poles from flooding in Sudan in the 1960s.

Thanks to a donation by philanthropist Wojciech Pawlowski, the museum was able to arrange the fragile, damaged wall paintings in settings reminiscent of the 8th-century cathedral that they had adorned.

One of the finest cubist collections in the world, painstakingly pieced together by a U.S. billionaire and pledged to the Metropolitan Museum in New York opens to the public on October 20.

Featuring 81 works of art by four artists, the museum says it will be the most important exhibition dedicated to the pioneers of the early 20th century avant-garde art movement in more than 30 years.