Nabih Bakhsh's family has been part of Afghanistan's musical tradition for generations. His great-grandfather was a musician in the court of the Afghan emperor 150 years ago. His father was a famous maestro and singer. Bakhsh too carried on the family art, performing and running an instrument repair shop.

Until now. The 70-year-old had to give up music and turn his shop into a convenience stall selling soda.

A group of Dutch historians has published an in-depth criticism of the work and conclusion of a cold case team that said it had pieced together the "most likely scenario" of who betrayed Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank and her family.

The cold case team's research, which was published early this year in the book "The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation," by Canadian academic and author Rosemary Sullivan, immediately drew criticism in the Netherlands.

The Taliban ordered girls' secondary schools in Afghanistan to shut Wednesday just hours after they reopened, an official confirmed, sparking confusion and heartbreak over the policy reversal by the hardline Islamist group.

"Yes, it's true," Taliban spokesman Inamullah Samangani told AFP when asked to confirm reports that girls had been ordered home.

A new report has found that Facebook failed to detect blatant hate speech and calls to violence against Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority years after such behavior was found to have played a determining role in the genocide against them.

The report shared exclusively with The Associated Press showed the rights group Global Witness submitted eight paid ads for approval to Facebook, each including different versions of hate speech against Rohingya. All eight ads were approved by Facebook to be published.

Finland has been named the world's happiest country for the fifth year running, in an annual U.N.-sponsored index that ranked Afghanistan as the unhappiest, closely followed by Lebanon.

The latest list was completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Yemen's Sira Fortress withstood attacks by the Portuguese and the Turks, but years of war have left the 11th century citadel in disrepair, defaced by graffiti and littered with rubbish.   

NAHNOO, a Lebanese non-governmental organization, launched Friday in collaboration with the U.N. Information Center in Beirut (UNIC Beirut), a campaign titled “Our Crafts, Our Identity,” to advocate for the ratification of a law that organizes and develops the crafts sector in Lebanon in line with the market needs.

The campaign will be promoted on social media and local TV stations. It aims at advocating for a legal framework for the Lebanese crafts sector to ensure much-needed economic, social, and cultural protection for craftsmen and craftswomen. It also falls within the framework of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that Lebanon is working on achieving, particularly SDGs 8 and 9 on promoting decent work, sustainable industrialization and innovation.

When Aliya Assadi was 12, she wore a hijab while representing her southern Indian state of Karnataka at a karate competition. She won gold.

Five years later she tried to wear one to her junior college, the equivalent of a U.S. high school. She never made it past the campus gate, turned away under a new policy barring the religious headgear.

The lingering injuries from being shot nine times did not stop Temel Atacocugu from completing a two-week walk and bike ride for peace on Tuesday, the third anniversary of a gunman's slaughter of 51 Muslim worshippers.

Atacocugu set out to retrace the gunman's 360-kilometer (224-mile) drive from Dunedin to the two Christchurch mosques where he carried out his attack.

Clarissa Ward interrupted her live TV report on Ukrainian refugees to help a distraught older man, then a woman, down a steep and explosion-mangled path, gently urging them on in their language.

A day later, Lynsey Addario, a photographer for The New York Times, captured a grim image of a Russian mortar attack's immediate outcome: the bodies of a mother and her two children crumpled on a road, amid their suitcase, backpacks and a pet carrier.