Apartment blocks near a mosque and a kindergarten daubed with cartoon characters seem an unlikely place for the slaughter of 27 alleged prostitutes, but in Baghdad death is never far.

Few people in the Iraqi capital's Zayouna district know any details of what happened in their neighborhood late on Saturday, and even fewer want to hazard a guess.

The head of Romania's Roman Catholic Church on Saturday urged President Traian Basescu to ensure an illegal office tower looming over a historical cathedral in the center of Bucharest is destroyed.

A Romanian appeals court in January ruled that a 75-meter (245-feet) tower next to the St Joseph Cathedral be torn down, ending years of legal battles.

Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk has agreed to donate $1 million to help fund a new museum dedicated to inventor Nikolai Tesla.

The organizer of a crowdfunding campaign for the new museum, Matthew Inman, made the announcement on his blog, weeks after publicly asking Musk for the donation for the center honoring the inventor who inspired the name for the electric car maker.

Salafists protested on Friday against government plans to reopen synagogues which were closed for security reasons during Algeria's civil war of the 1990s.

After weekly Friday prayers at Al-Mouminine mosque in the poor Belcourt district of Algiers, dozens of worshipers tried to march in the streets but were blocked by police, an Agence France Presse journalist reported.

A "bamboo ceiling" exists in Australia for Asians entering positions of power in business, education and politics, the country's race discrimination commissioner has suggested.

Tim Soutphommasane said that while Australia's cultural diversity was to be welcomed, equality of opportunity in the top echelons was lacking.

The Church of England could be set to allow its first female bishops -- and not before time, says one of those tipped for the job, adding the days of women being left to arrange the flowers are gone.

Rose Hudson-Wilkin thinks it would be "seismic" if the Church votes on Monday to allow Anglican women to take the top jobs after decades of debate on their role.

It was one of the greatest love stories in history and now the marriage certificate that sealed the union of Napoleon and his first wife Josephine is to be sold at auction in September.

The document dated March 8, 1796, was signed by the future Napoleon I and his fiancee Marie Josephe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, or Josephine, the Viscomtesse de Beauharnais.

Many Germans still love to bask naked on the beaches of Spain and France but at home, long the land of the all-over tan, the nudist movement is in decline.

For almost a century, German sun-worshippers have been known to rip off their clothes at the first sighting of the country's all-too-rare summer rays.

Prayer rooms, hijabs made from local silk and even halal-certified whale meat are appearing in Japan as tourism bosses wake up to the demand from Muslim travelers.

For a largely homogeneous country with only around 100,000 practicing Muslims, that means groping its way through unfamiliar customs as it looks to tap a growing market to help it double the number of overseas visitors by 2020.

A lost Van Dyck painting spotted on a British television program failed to find a buyer at a Tuesday auction despite estimates it would fetch 1,000 times its original price.

Auctioneers Christie's had estimated the sketch for the 1635 work "The Magistrates Of Brussels" would sell for between £300,000 and £500,000 ($856,000, 630,000 euros), but it did not find a buyer.