Pope Francis on Tuesday prepared to celebrate his first Christmas as pontiff with a mass in St Peter's Basilica as a giant traditional Nativity scene named in his honor was unveiled on St Peter's Square.

The Nativity scene made by Naples artisan Antonio Cantone this year is entitled "Francis 1223 -- Francis 2013" -- a reference to St Francis of Assisi, who inspired the pope's choice of name when he was elected.

As winter approaches, the Samis of northern Sweden move thousands of reindeer down from the snow-covered mountains for lowland grazing. They have done so for centuries, but they wonder how much longer they can continue.

The mining industry is one of several modern threats to the unique way of life of the Samis, the only indigenous people in the EU, and one small, tightly-knit community has decided to fight back.

British retailer Marks & Spencer faced criticism on Monday after it emerged that it allows Muslim staff to refuse to sell customers pork and alcohol.

More than 8,000 people have signed up to a Facebook page calling for a boycott of the chain after an "extremely apologetic" Muslim checkout worker told a customer they would have to wait for another employee to sell them a bottle of champagne.

After a decade of unrest, Bethlehem has seen a surge in visits to Christ's traditional birthplace, raising hopes of a tourism bonanza in the West Bank town despite Israel's separation barrier.

The Palestinian territories' top tourist destination is a victim of the barrier which cuts off the town from nearby Jerusalem, just 10 kilometers (six miles) away.

The daughter-in-law smashes the cockroach under her foot and rolls open the rusted metal doors to the garage. Light spills onto a small figure huddled on a straw mattress in a dank room. A curious face peers out.

The face is the most infamous in this village tucked away in the lush green mountains of southwest China. It's the face of Kuang Shiying's 94-year-old mother-in-law — better known as the little old lady who sued her own children for not taking care of her.

Rising out of the jungle on white pillars, the new Preah Vihear Museum's largest building stands empty. But Cambodian officials hope that one day it will be the place where nine ancient statues depicting a dramatic battle scene are reunited from around the world.

They came a step closer to that goal last week, when Sotheby's auction house in New York agreed to return one of the statues to Cambodia, ending a heated legal battle that began when the U.S. government filed a lawsuit last year at Cambodia's initiative to press for its return.

Between two trucks on an abandoned, garbage-strewn railway, teenagers openly shoot up drugs as children pass by on their way to school -- a daily scene in Karachi, where heroin is undermining Pakistan's efforts to combat the spread of HIV.

"You can find any drug you want in Karachi," said Shahzad Ali, his left hand swollen by repeated injections, one of tens of thousands in the city of 20 million lured to cheap Afghan heroin.

Religious authorities married 1,111 couples at a mass wedding aimed at combating rising rates of divorce and births out of wedlock, and the number of impoverished widows and divorcees forced to make a living on the streets in mainly Muslim northern Nigeria.

Thursday's wedding in Kano city comes as the Hisbah Board responsible for Shariah law has been clamping down. Thousands have been arrested in recent months for improper dress, prostitution and indecent mixing of the sexes. At one recent ceremony, a bulldozer crushed 240,000 bottles of beer.

Angels exist but do not have wings and are more like shards of light, at least according to a top Catholic Church "angelologist" who says the heavenly beings are now back in vogue thanks to New Age religions.

"I think there is a re-discovery of angels in Christianity," Father Renzo Lavatori told Agence France Presse on the sidelines of a conference on angels in a lavishly-frescoed Renaissance palace in Rome.

A Vincent Van Gogh painting that has been hidden away at a Virginia estate for decades will have a new home at the National Gallery of Art.

The rarely seen 1890 painting, "Green Wheat Fields, Auvers," depicts a landscape in bright greens and blues from northern France when Van Gogh was living just north of Paris in Auvers-sur-Oise. The painting was given to the museum by philanthropist and art collector Paul Mellon, and it has been kept in his family's home in Upperville, Virginia, since 1955.