Women and girls will be at the heart of the UK's international work as the British Foreign Secretary launches a new strategy to tackle gender inequality around the world, a statement said.

The British Embassy Beirut launched the Ambassador for a Day Lebanon competition in January this year. The competition was open to 15-18 year old girls across Lebanon and over 500 girls submitted entries on the International Women’s Day 2023 theme “Embrace Equity”. The creativity, passion and potential in their applications was inspiring.

Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the country has become the most repressive in the world for women and girls, deprived of many of their basic rights, the United Nations said Wednesday.

In a statement released on the International Women's Day, the U.N. mission said that Afghanistan's new rulers have shown an almost "singular focus on imposing rules that leave most women and girls effectively trapped in their homes."

On the eve of International Women's Day, leading women's rights campaigners at the United Nations and the African Union and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate criticized male-dominated governments Tuesday for excluding women from peace negotiations.

They complained that governments are ignoring a U.N. resolution adopted in 2000 demanding equal participation for women in talks to end conflicts.

The Vatican and Greece were finalizing a deal Tuesday for the return of three sculpture fragments from the Parthenon that have been in the collection of the Vatican Museums for two centuries, the latest case of a Western museum bowing to demands for restitution.

The Vatican has termed the return an ecumenical "donation" to the Orthodox Christian archbishop of Athens and all Greece, not necessarily a state-to-state transfer. But it nevertheless puts pressure on the British Museum to conclude a deal with Greece over the fate of its much bigger collection of Parthenon sculptures.

The reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris is going fast enough to allow its reopening to visitors and faithful at the end of 2024, less than six years after a fire ravaged its roof, French officials said.

The cathedral's iconic spire, which collapsed in the blaze, will gradually start reappearing above the monument this year in a powerful signal of its revival, the army general in charge of the colossal project, Gen. Jean-Louis Georgelin, said.

Archaeologists unearthed a Sphinx-like statue and the remains of a shrine in an ancient temple in southern Egypt, antiquities authorities said Monday.

The artifacts were found in the temple of Dendera in Qena Province, 280 miles (450 kilometers) south of the capital of Cairo, the Antiquities Ministry said in a statement.

A new Haruki Murakami novel will be published in April and the publisher is saying little about it except that the Japanese manuscript is around 1,200 pages and the plot involves "a story that had long been sealed."

"The City and Its Uncertain Walls" will be released on April 13 in both print and digital formats, Shinchosha Publishing Co. said in a statement on Wednesday. The availability of an English translation is not yet known.

An international archeological mission has uncovered the remnants of what is believed to be a 5,000-year-old restaurant or tavern in the ancient city of Lagash in southern Iraq.

The discovery of the ancient dining hall — complete with a rudimentary refrigeration system, hundreds of roughly made clay bowls and the fossilized remains of an overcooked fish — announced in late January by a University of Pennsylvania-led team, generated some buzz beyond Iraq's borders.

At an upcoming meeting of national soccer federations, FIFA will be urged to compensate migrant workers and families of those who died or were injured on World Cup projects in Qatar.

The issue will be raised by Norwegian soccer officials at the FIFA Congress meeting on March 16 in Rwanda, human rights group Amnesty International said Wednesday. It will be the first post-tournament meeting of more than 200 federations.