Twenty-five years after the West condemned the "butchers" who crushed protesters in Tiananmen Square, China's astonishing economic and military transformation means the world has largely set aside concerns on human rights as it courts the former pariah.

Outraged Western nations imposed economic sanctions and banned arms sales after troops killed hundreds of people during the night of June 3-4, 1989 as they cleared Beijing's streets of students agitating for democracy.

Waxworks company Madame Tussauds on Thursday launched its latest outpost in Beijing, with models of Chinese political leaders conspicuous by their absence.

U.S. President Barack Obama was on display, along with a grim-looking Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Britain's Queen Elizabeth II. Even Karl Marx, founding father of Communism, was included.

China is making arrangements for an extra 2 million babies per year as it loosens its one-child policy to give more couples the opportunity to have two children.

Zhang Shikun, an official with the National Health and Family Planning Commission, said Thursday that authorities have asked local officials to build more health-care facilities for women and children and add more maternity beds.

Jews and Muslims have coexisted for hundreds of years on Tunisia's Djerba island, but while relations between the two are good, some members of the tiny Jewish community say the atmosphere is stifling.

"We, the Jews, have been living here for more than 2,000 years," said Claudine Saghroun, who lives in the Hara Kbira, the island's large Jewish neighborhood.

Maya Angelou, the beloved African-American author and civil rights activist renowned for a searing memoir charting her childhood in the racially segregated South, died Wednesday. She was 86.

Angelou was best known for the first installment of her memoirs "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," the first non-fiction best-seller by an African-American woman.

Gold icons and expressionist paintings from one of Russia's top art museums will go on permanent show in an old tobacco factory in Spain, officials said Wednesday.

The southern Spanish city of Malaga, home to thousands of Russian expats, has signed an agreement to host the first overseas branch of Saint Petersburg's State Russian Museum.

Tracey Emin's unmade bed artfully littered with condoms, cigarette packs and underwear is expected to fetch around £1 million (1.2 million euros, $1.7 million) at auction.

The work, called simply "My Bed", cemented Emin's notoriety when it was shortlisted for the 1999 Turner Prize, although the British artist eventually lost out to future Oscar winner Steve McQueen, who directed "12 Years a Slave".

Three years ago, guest speaker Mindy Kaling joked that publishing's annual national convention, BookExpo America, resembled "a high school reunion where all the jocks were killed in a plane crash, and all the minorities, too."

Little seems to have changed.

Widely eclipsed by the horror of the Nazi era, World War I seems to have found its way back into the minds of many Germans with a slew of new books ahead of the centenary of the war's outbreak.

Chancellor Angela Merkel commented recently that the 1914-18 war featured more prominently in the collective memories of Britons or the French -- both countries refer to it as the "Great War" -- than in Germany.

The Archbishop of Canterbury met church leaders in Pakistan Tuesday as he began a visit that comes amid concerns about the plight of the country's beleaguered Christian minority.

Justin Welby, the leader of the world's Anglicans, will meet Muslim leaders and senior government officials during his stay, part of a week-long tour that will also take in India and Bangladesh.