Akane had always enjoyed her job at a Tokyo call center until, unlike many Japanese mothers, she decided to return to work after finishing her maternity leave.

It was not long before colleagues started picking on the 30-something mother for working shorter hours or being away from the office due to child-care issues.

With Islamic State group militants on the doorstep of his hometown in eastern Syria, Yaroob al-Abdullah had little time. He had already rushed his wife and four daughters to safety. Now he had to save the thousands of ancient artifacts he loved.

In a week of furious work in summer heat, tired and dehydrated from the Ramadan fast, the head of antiquities in Deir el-Zour province and his staff packed up most of the contents of the museum in the provincial capital. Then al-Abdullah flew with 12 boxes of relics to Damascus.

The Lebanese Brevet and Baccalaureate exams (as they are still commonly known) have been around for quite awhile that most people are taking them for granted, and very little research has been undertaken to ascertain the viability (validity, reliability, efficiency, etc.) of these national exit exams and their repercussions on students, teachers, and other stakeholders in the educational community and on the nation at large, says Professor Ibrahim A. Halloun, the Founding President of H Institute -- a nonprofit research and development organization.

Former fashion mogul Pierre Berge lashed out Wednesday at designers creating Islamic clothing and headscarves, accusing them of taking part in the "enslavement of women."

A huge trove of Aboriginal artifacts, which could have been part of an armory, has been unearthed at an Australian building site, experts said Wednesday.

Specialists hailed the discovery of the more than 20,000 objects which were found during the development of a multi-billion dollar transport project in a Sydney suburb and called for excavation work to be stopped while the find is assessed.

She is one of Israel's "chained women" -- the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of wives denied a divorce by their husbands and prevented from breaking free by the country's use of Jewish law.

The 30-year-old mother of two is hardly unique in struggling to obtain a divorce in a country where men must grant permission for their wives to leave.

A Syrian expert for the U.N.'s cultural body said Monday she was "very doubtful" the destruction caused to Palmyra's ancient monuments during its occupation by the Islamic State group can be repaired.

Bangladesh's high court on Monday rejected a petition by secular activists to scrap Islam as the state religion in the wake of nationwide protests by hardline Islamist groups.

A special bench of three judges threw out the petition within moments of opening the case and without allowing any testimony, an AFP correspondent at the court said.

An American museum on Monday  returned to Cambodia a 10th-century sandstone sculpture of the Hindu god Rama decades after it was looted from a jungle temple during the kingdom's civil war.

The 62-inch-tall torso, which was stolen in the 1970s from the Koh Ker temple site near the famed Angkor Wat complex, was handed over by the Denver Art Museum at a ceremony in Phnom Penh. 

Syria's antiquities chief said on Monday that his department would need five years to restore the ancient ruins of Palmyra damaged by the Islamic State jihadist group.

"If we have UNESCO's approval, we will need five years to restore the structures damaged or destroyed by IS," Maamoun Abdulkarim told Agence France Presse.