Nobel prize season starts Monday with speculation rife that the peace prize could go to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, Pakistani girls' education campaigner Malala Yousafzai, or perhaps Pope Francis.

Last year, the physics prize awarded to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for the Higgs particle was widely predicted, but Nobel pundits and bookmakers tend to focus more on who will get the prestigious peace and literature awards.

Israel was in security lockdown Friday for the Jewish fast of Yom Kippur, which is coinciding with the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha for the first time in three decades.

The Israeli army said it had sealed off the occupied West Bank from Thursday night to Saturday night for the solemn holiday.

Tears flowed and prayers filled the air as the annual Muslim hajj by close to two million believers from around the world reached its zenith on a vast plain in western Saudi Arabia Friday.

"I am now a newborn baby and I don't have any sin," Nigerian pilgrim Taofik Odunewu told AFP, standing at the foot of Mount Mercy on the Arafat plain, tears streaming down his face.

Nice-guy Pope Francis looks set to have his mettle tested by his first mutiny in the ranks this weekend at a Catholic meeting on the contentious issue of traditional marriage.

The Church has long refused to relax rules for "sinners", but amid a flurry of countries legalizing same-sex marriage and a rise in divorce levels, reform-minded Francis has suggested there may be wiggle-room on doctrine, sparking panic among conservatives.

If the Socialist government gets its way, visitors to France's three most touristic museums — the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay and Versailles Palace — may get to visit seven days a week in coming years.

But a powerful labor union could get in the way.

There is a whiff of sheep dung in the early evening air as the sun drops from sight and Ali Al-Shamrani ponders the market for his animals ahead of Saturday's Eid al-Adha festival.

"This year they are more expensive," he says outside a pen of about 40 Saudi Arabian Naimy-variety sheep, most of them with brown heads and thick dirty-white fleece.

What brings more fame than accepting the Nobel Prize? Not accepting it -- as Jean-Paul Sartre showed with a celebrated "non" to the world's most prestigious award exactly 50 years ago.

When the Swedish Academy made the announcement on October 22, 1964 that the French philosopher had won the prize for literature, he was lunching at a restaurant near the Parisian home of fellow intellectual heavyweight Simone de Beauvoir.

Every year ahead of the Muslim feast of sacrifice, a showroom in Indonesia swaps cars for hulking cows costing up to $25,000 each, seeking to lure a wealthy elite increasingly keen on ploughing money into celebrating their religion.

Some of the world's top authors will thrash out hot political issues at the world's biggest international book fair opening in Germany Tuesday.

For decades, whiskeys have been the status beverage of choice in Venezuela: an expensive, imported taste acquired during the country's oil boom.

But with the economy now in a bust, Venezuelans are increasingly returning to long-snubbed local rum to drown their sorrows.