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.

A Syrian filmmaker close to the opposition who made a film about a notorious regime prison has been stabbed by an unknown assailant in Istanbul, supporters and Syrian groups said Wednesday.

Muhammad Bayazid was stabbed on Tuesday while on his way to a meeting, according to an account posted on the filmmaker's official Facebook page by a friend who witnessed the attack.

After two rounds of voting to pick the next head of the U.N.'s troubled cultural body, Qatari diplomat Hamad bin Abdulaziz al-Kawari has emerged as the leading contender.

It has been buffeted by the pendulum swing of domestic politics and suffered looting that left it without some of its most precious items.

The final poems of Leonard Cohen, completed days before the legendary songwriter died, will be published in an anthology next year, his estate announced late Friday.

Nuclear disarmament group ICAN won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for its decade-long campaign to rid the world of the atomic bomb as nuclear-fuelled crises swirl over North Korea and Iran.

"The organisation is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons," said Norway's Nobel committee president Berit Reiss-Andersen.

Brazil is becoming an increasingly dangerous place for transgender people but four popular singers are among those who think they can change the tune.

According to the rights group Transgender Europe, Brazil topped a list of 33 countries for trans killings between October 2015 and September 2016, accounting for 123 out of a worldwide count of 295.

British author Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his novel "The Remains of the Day" and whose emotional uprooting from his native Japan has left an indelible stamp on his work, won the 2017 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday.

A U.S. congressman who sponsored legislation criminalizing late-term abortion announced Wednesday he will not seek re-election next year, after a report revealed he urged his mistress to have an abortion.

"After discussions with my family and staff, I have come to the decision that I will not seek reelection to Congress at the end of my current term," House Republican Tim Murphy, who has been popular with members of the pro-life movement, said in a statement according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.