Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei on Thursday slammed Western values which he said, unlike those in the Islamic republic, undermine feminism.

His comments come amid political tensions in Iran where conservatives want to strengthen measures preventing women and men from mixing while President Hassan Rouhani advocates more social freedoms.

At the start of September 1914, after just one month of war in Europe, the German army were at the gates of Paris. The word on the street was that Emperor Wilhelm II had already booked a dinner table on the Champs-Elysees.

Poorly-equipped and badly-organised, the French army was in dire straits, retreating on all fronts alongside their newly-arrived British allies.

Egypt's top religious body demanded Wednesday that a new belly-dancing TV show be suspended for "corrupting morals" and serving "extremists" who could use it as a pretext to depict Egyptian society as anti-Islamic.

The call by Dar al-Ifta, the top body that advises Muslims on religious and life issues, follows others criticizing the show called "Dancer." But the debate over it isn't all about it being too racy for television — it's part of a concerted effort by Egypt's government to show its both challenging Islamists as a political forces while still respecting the country's more-conservative values.

Several historic buildings, including a colonial-era structure, have been blown up in Syria's second city of Aleppo, where fighting has wrought massive destruction, reports said Wednesday.

Rebel fighters destroyed "several old buildings on Tuesday night by placing explosives in a tunnel leading under the Old City of Aleppo," state television said.

"Summer of the Dead" (Minotaur Books), by Julia Keller

Small towns — where everyone knows your name and keeping secrets seems unfathomable — can be hotbeds of concealment. No one really knows what goes on behind closed doors or within a family's dynamics.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and all six other members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the country's most powerful body, made a rare public appearance Wednesday to commemorate 69 years since Japan's surrender at the end of World War II.

The ceremony was the first since Beijing earlier this year declared September 3 as a national day to mark Japan's defeat -- it signed the formal surrender on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, with China celebrating the following day.

Economic prosperity is the worst enemy of minority languages, said researchers Wednesday who listed parts of Australia and North America as "hotspots" for extinction risk.

Based on the same criteria used to determine the risk of extinction faced by animal and plant species, they concluded that about a quarter of the world's known 6,909 languages were threatened.

Germany will inaugurate the first national memorial to the estimated 300,000 ill and disabled people systematically murdered by the Nazis on Tuesday, at a ceremony with victims' relatives.

The site next to the Tiergarten park is the fourth and likely final major memorial in Berlin's city center to groups targeted in the Holocaust, following monuments dedicated over the last decade to Jewish, gay and Roma victims.

Colombia has successfully recovered from Spain hundreds of priceless, pre-Colombian artifacts smuggled out of the country more than a decade ago.

The 691 cultural treasures include carved funeral urns and conch-shaped musical instruments that, in some cases, date back thousands of years. All are from ancient societies that inhabited the northern part of the Andes prior to the arrival of Spanish explorers in the 16th century.

Members of Saudi Arabia's religious police roughed up a British resident of Riyadh after they caught him paying at a women-only cash desk, local media reported on Monday.

Saudi Arabia imposes a strict interpretation of Islamic laws, notably a segregation of the sexes.