An Iranian court has sentenced filmmaker and actress Pegah Ahangarani to 18 months in prison, her mother told ISNA news agency Monday, apparently for her social activities, political comments and interviews with foreign media.

"She has been sentenced to 18 months in the trial court," Manijeh Hekmat, who is also a director, told ISNA without giving further details.

Sweden had a head start in the good parenting debate as the first country to outlaw smacking but some argue that its child-centered approach has gone too far and children now rule the roost.

"In some ways Swedish kids are really ill-mannered," David Eberhard, a leading psychiatrist and father of six, told Agence France Presse.

Happily hunched over his iPad, Britain's most celebrated living artist David Hockney is pioneering in the art world again, turning his index finger into a paintbrush that he uses to swipe across a touch screen to create vibrant landscapes, colorful forests and richly layered scenes.

"It's a very new medium," said Hockney. So new, in fact, he wasn't sure what he was creating until he began printing his digital images a few years ago. "I was pretty amazed by them actually," he said, laughing. "I'm still amazed."

At least 16 Saudi women have received fines for taking the wheel on a day set by activists to defy the kingdom's traditional ban on female driving, police and reports said Sunday.

Only few women braved official threats of punishment and drove on Saturday in response to an online campaign headlined "Women's driving is a choice."

A private museum in southern Spain is opening an exhibition of rare Islamic art and scientific objects that highlight the use of light in decoration and studies in the Arab world.

The exhibition, "Nur: Light in art and science in the Islamic world," is sponsored by the energy company Abengoa and has gathered 150 pieces from collections such those of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and private collectors from around the world.

Macedonia'a Orthodox Church on Friday ordered its priests and nuns not to use Facebook or be ready to face unnamed sanctions, church officials said.

"Everyone among the clergy will face sanctions if using Facebook," the church's spokesman, Bishop Timotej, told reporters.

Looking to find a husband, make friends, and get ahead at work? Then you need to have lighter skin. That's the all-pervasive message in India, and it's something that one actress is fighting to overturn.

The new poster girl of the "Dark is Beautiful" campaign, Nandita Das, has called out India's obsession with fair skin -- a prejudice she says has driven some young women to the brink of suicide.

Every October, hundreds of South Korean teachers and professors are sequestered -- like jurors in a mafia trial -- in a secret, guarded compound: prisoners of their country's obsession with education.

For one month, they are kept in complete isolation under conditions that resemble house arrest, with everything down to their food waste subject to rigorous examination.

A museum of African design opened in a renovated Johannesburg warehouse Thursday, promising to showcase work by the continent's finest contemporary artists.

Around 200 works by 100 artists fill the space in the city's old industrial area Maboneng. Most are from southern Africa, but director Aaron Kohn said the museum had continental ambitions.

Two pre-Columbian mummies more than a thousand years old were found in a pre-Incan cemetery in a suburb of Lima, archeologists said Thursday.

"This is one of the most important finds in more than three decades of excavation, because both mummies are intact," Gladys Paz told Agence France Presse at the foot of the Huaca Pucllana tomb, an ancient religious complex in the Miraflores neighborhood.