When Moroccan divorcee Soumaya moved in with her new French boyfriend she was hoping to forget the unhappiness of her marriage. Instead, she lost her children.

It's a crime in Muslim Morocco to live together out of wedlock, and unmarried couples not only face police harassment but also the prying eyes of disapproving neighbors.

One 29-year-old woman says it helped her take revenge on her unfaithful husband.

A 45-year-old married man says it has helped prevent the break-up of his family.

American scholar Wendy Doniger said she was "angry and disappointed" that all copies of her latest book on Hinduism will be pulped in India after a legal row that has ignited fears about free speech.

Her publisher Penguin agreed on Monday to withdraw the 2009 book "The Hindus: An Alternative History" to settle a court battle with an activist group which took offence to the depiction of the religion.

Violin virtuoso Frank Almond had spent years learning the nuances of the 300-year-old Stradivarius violin that its owner had loaned to him. So when the $5 million instrument was stolen last month and recovered nine days later, he was worried it might have sustained serious damage in the process.

Fortunately it turned out to be fine, he said Tuesday.

A U.S. museum official says construction workers have found a tusk from an ice age mammoth.

KIRO-TV reports that the workers stopped digging when they found the fossil and called Seattle's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

A controversial plan to ban women in Spain from freely opting for abortions faced a hurdle on Tuesday when lawmakers were to vote on a motion to scrap the reform.

The plan has not only outraged pro-choice groups but has sparked division even within the conservative ruling party.

Activists on Tuesday called for more surveillance of Syrian archaeological sites and a crackdown on trading in looted art at the opening of an international campaign to save the war-torn country's heritage.

The campaign, launched in Rome and entitled "The Forgotten Victim in Syria", is being supported by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin along with leading figures from the worlds of politics and art.

China expressed outrage Monday at a proposal by a Japanese city to list letters written by World War II suicide pilots on a United Nations register -- alongside Anne Frank's diary.

Minami-Kyushu last week filed an application to include the Japanese kamikaze pilots' farewell letters on a Unesco world memory list, media including public broadcaster NHK have reported.

Activists took to a piano perched on Kiev's most famous anti-government barricade Monday, playing Chopin, the national anthem and the Beatles' "Let it Be" as riot police looked on.

Eurovision song contest winner Ruslana joined others in gently stroking the instrument -- painted in the blue and yellow colours of the Ukrainian flag -- as it sat delicately poised on a barrier separating protesters from police.

Syrian painter and dissident Youssef Abdelke offers a haunting vision of the war tearing his country apart, in which neither individuals nor symbols are spared from violence.

One painting shows a knife hanging over the corpse of a bird, another the empty gaze of the mothers of "martyrs" lost to the fighting, and a third shows a decapitated head.