Growing cultural ties between Iran and Europe were on display on Wednesday night as a French-Iranian conductor became one of the first Westerners to lead the Tehran Symphony Orchestra since the revolution.

Ilya looks tired and drawn. After being beaten and tortured by men in military uniform in Russia's Chechnya region, he fled to Moscow but still fears for his life -- because he is gay.

UNESCO awarded its prestigious peace prize on Wednesday to migrant rescue association SOS Mediterranee and the mayor of Lampedusa, the tiny Italian island on the frontline of the refugee crisis. 

Despite the danger of excessive internet use and the threat of bullying, most teenagers around the world are "relatively" happy with their lot, a major OECD survey showed Wednesday.

Three senior members of India's ruling Hindu nationalist party including a cabinet minister should face trial over the demolition of a mosque a quarter of a century ago, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered more than 1,000 statues and 10 sarcophagi in an ancient noble's tomb on the west bank of the Nile River in Luxor.

The Antiquities Ministry said Tuesday that the tomb was built for a judge during the New Kingdom period, from roughly 1,500 to 1,000 B.C.

A debate is raging in Austria after a study suggested that Islamic kindergartens in Vienna were helping to create "parallel societies" or even produce the dangerous homegrown radicals of the future.

In the foothills of the Aspromonte mountains in southern Italy, the silence of a once-dying village is broken by the laughter of a small group of refugees.

Egyptian Copts observed a solemn Good Friday with prayers and fasting, as the community reeled from a pair of church bombings that killed dozens on Palm Sunday.

The government had declared a state of emergency and called in the army to protect "vital" installations following last week's suicide bombings claimed by the Islamic State group.

When Nadia's heroin addict husband began assaulting her with a metal rod, she did something unthinkable for many women in Afghanistan -- she left him. 

Domestic abuse is endemic in the deeply patriarchal country, but for the first time a growing number of Afghan women are embracing divorce as a new kind of empowerment.