Canada's Quebec province Wednesday prohibited government workers and anyone receiving government services from covering their face, in a move critics say unfairly targets Muslim women who wear a niqab veil.

Two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school due to growing insecurity and poverty, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday, underlining the challenges of educating women in the patriarchal country 16 years after the Taliban were ousted.

Three British and three US authors will on Tuesday discover which one of them is the winner of this year's Man Booker Prize, whose shortlist stirred controversy over its big name omissions.

A new law banning cat-calling and harassment of women on French streets will see men fined on the spot for lecherous and aggressive behavior, France's women's minister said Monday.

Israeli archaeologists in Jerusalem's Old City on Monday unveiled a newly unearthed section of the Western Wall and the first Roman public structure ever discovered in the city, they said.

The queue outside Lisbon's first Syrian restaurant on its opening day showed an appetite not just for Syrian food but for integration in one of the few European countries trying to welcome more refugees.

The election of UNESCO's new chief has been narrowed down to two candidates, one from Qatar and the other from France.

The winner to be selected on Friday will succeed outgoing Director-General Irina Bokova, whose 8-year term leading the U.N. cultural agency was marred by financial woes and criticism over Palestine's inclusion as a member.

The United States and Israel announced Thursday they were pulling out of U.N. cultural body UNESCO -- an organization that has seen its share of controversy during a 70-year history.

Hunched over platters of dates and Arabic coffee, Saudi women raring to drive once a government ban ends next June signed up for another revolution —- to be the kingdom's first female cab drivers.

A husband and wife from Colorado have dropped their bid to prevent a 2,300-year-old marble bull's head from being returned to Lebanon, where New York prosecutors say it had been stolen during the country's civil war in 1981.