China's push to encourage more couples to have a second child after decades of restrictive family planning policies has fallen short of expectations in the first year, state media reported Monday.

The National Health and Family Planning Commission received less than half of the expected two million annual applications for couples to have a second child, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, without citing exact numbers.

Turkey's increasingly stringent television watchdog has fined a national private channel over a show where the characters discussed the merits of strawberry-flavored condoms, the Hurriyet daily reported Saturday.

TV 2 was fined 12,353 Turkish lira ($5,320) for broadcasting the segment from the French-produced comedy sketch show "Vous Les Femmes", which in Turkish is broadcast as "Ah Biz Kadinlar" and in English-speaking countries as "Women!".

Slain Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero has moved one step closer to beatification.

Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference, reported Friday that a committee of theologians had confirmed that Romero died as a martyr. The designation means he can be beatified without having a miracle attributed to his intercession. A miracle is needed, however, for him to be made a saint.

Pope Francis embarks on his second Asian pilgrimage this coming week, visiting Sri Lanka and the Philippines exactly 20 years after St. John Paul II's record-making visit to two countries with wildly disparate Catholic populations. Francis will make headlines of his own, drawing millions of faithful in the Philippines and treading uncharted political waters following Sri Lanka's remarkable electoral upset this past week.

New Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, who capitalized on former President Mahinda Rajapaksa's unpopularity among the island nation's ethnic and religious minorities, will be on hand to welcome Francis when he arrives in the capital, Colombo, on Tuesday.

Russia has passed a controversial law banning transvestites, transsexuals and people with other "disorders"  from driving, prompting sharp criticism from rights activists, including a prominent Kremlin advisor.

The legislation, which took effect this week, says its aims at lowering the country's high death rate from road accidents.

Furious Kenyan villagers said they wasted a day waiting for a "witchdoctor" to bring a corpse back to life after he failed because he was too "tired", a report said Friday.

Scores of villagers in Kenya's southeastern Kwale district turned up singing and dancing to see the "miracle", Kenya's The Star newspaper reported.

Depictions of Prophet Mohammed such as the cartoons published by the French satirical magazine reeling from a deadly attack are banned in Islam and mocking him angers many Muslims.

Although images poking fun at the prophet have repeatedly infuriated the Islamic world, Arab and Muslim leaders and clerics were quick to condemn the attack. Sunni Islam's most prestigious center of learning Al-Azhar said "Islam denounces any violence".

Russia has passed a controversial law banning transvestites and transsexuals from driving, prompting sharp criticism from rights activists, including a prominent Kremlin advisor.

The legislation that entered into force this week bans anyone diagnosed with a range of personality and gender identity disorders, including transvestites and transsexuals, from taking the wheel.

More than five million barefoot devotees paraded a centuries-old icon of Jesus Christ through Manila Friday in a loud, heaving paroxysm of religious fervor ahead of Pope Francis's visit to Asia's bastion of Christianity.

In fervent displays of devotion, huge crowds of men, women and children chanted "Viva!" (Long live!) and twirled white handkerchiefs at the Black Nazarene, with some hurling themselves at the supposedly miraculous statue for good luck.

French author Michel Houellebecq has suspended the promotion of his new novel "Submission", a dystopian vision of France under Islamic rule, after this week's massacre at satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, his agent said.

The book was released on Wednesday -- the same day that 12 people were killed when gunmen stormed the magazine's Paris office, including some of France's best known cartoonists.