In many countries, public libraries are considered a dying relic amid the shift to digital, but in Lebanon they are getting a new lease of life as its economy flatlines.

As South Korea enters a bitter presidential race, Hong Hee-jin is one of many young women who feel that the country's politics has become dominated by discrimination against women, even outright misogyny.

"Women are being treated like they don't even have voting rights," the 27-year-old office worker in the capital, Seoul, said.

A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists said that it had found a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine at a remote Neolithic site in Jordan's eastern desert.

The ritual complex was found in a Neolithic campsite near large structures known as "desert kites," or mass traps that are believed to have been used to corral wild gazelles for slaughter.

LGBTQ representation on scripted TV series has grown along with the footprint of streaming services, according to an annual study by the advocacy group GLAAD.

"TV is leading entertainment in telling LGBTQ stories," Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, said in the "Where We Are on TV" report on the 2021-22 season that was released.

Peter Paul Rubens' 17th century masterpiece "Portrait of a Lady" is set to go up for auction in Poland next month, the DESA Unicum auction house said.

The Flemish master's oil-on-canvas portrait of a dark-haired woman in a rich black velvet dress has an estimated value of 18 million to 24 million zlotys ($4.5 million- $6 million).

The Biden administration on Friday released a screening tool to help identify disadvantaged communities long plagued by environmental hazards, but it won't include race as a factor in deciding where to devote resources.

Administration officials told reporters that excluding race will make projects less likely to draw legal challenges and will be easier to defend, even as they acknowledged that race has been a major factor in terms of who experiences environmental injustice.

An iconic Gaza bookstore destroyed in an Israeli airstrike last year has reopened, lifting the spirits of its ecstatic owner and a large crowd of well-wishers celebrating the moment.

The five-story building that housed Samir Mansour's bookstore on its ground floor was reduced to rubble during the 11-day war between Israel and the Palestinian territory's Hamas rulers in May. The 100,000 books at the shop became piles of torn papers mired in ash and dust.

Red clothing and underwear are displayed in Saudi shopfronts, but the increasingly popular Valentine's Day promotions are missing one thing: the festival's name.

From his small music shop on Beirut's Hamra Street, Michel Eid witnessed the rise and fall of Lebanon through the changing fortunes of this famed boulevard for more than 60 years.

Hamra Street represented everything that was glamorous about Beirut in the 1960s and 1970s, with Lebanon's top movie houses and theaters, cafes frequented by intellectuals and artists, and ritzy shops. It saw a revival the past decade, with international chain stores and vibrant bars and restaurants.

A Russian gallery says one of its security guards has vandalized an avant-garde painting on loan from the country's top art repository by drawing eyes on the picture's deliberately featureless faces. It said the damage can be repaired.

The Yeltsin Center in Ekaterinburg said the vandalism of the painting "Three Figures" by Anna Leporskaya occurred Dec. 7. It said the suspected culprit worked for a private company providing security at the gallery.