A former Miss Ukraine stripped of her crown and barred from competing for Miss World because she is a mother has launched legal action against the contest, demanding a rule change.

Nadyn Jouny's sister taped up two messages in her memory inside a closet at the family home — one of motherly love tinged with pain, another of defiance.

The first Jouny wrote to her 9-year-old son on the one day a week she was allowed to see him under a custody ruling by a Shiite religious court. "Peace be upon the holy nights when you fall asleep near me," she wrote. "Peace be upon the trace of love painted on your face and features ... This is my night."

At 29, Spandan Sharma doesn't own a flat, a car, or even a chair -- one of a growing number of Indian millennials bucking traditional norms and instead opting to rent everything from furniture to iPhones.

Migrant workers in Qatar are facing discrimination because of their nationality, racial identity, stereotyping and the "prevalence" of profiling, an independent U.N. expert warned on Sunday. 

Before the discovery of oil transformed the Gulf into one of the world's wealthiest regions, the fortunes of its people depended on pearling -- a tradition that Abdullah al-Suwaidi hopes to revive.

A French court on Tuesday confirmed the two-year suspended jail terms given to Pablo Picasso's former electrician and his wife, who hoarded 271 of the great painter's works in a garage for four decades. 

It is the closest that anyone outside the super rich is ever likely to get to owning a painting by Picasso.

A canvas by the Spanish master worth more than one million euros ($1.1 million) is to be raffled off for charity.

Madrid on Thursday confirmed that four Spanish nationals were injured when a knife-wielding Yemeni man attacked a group of actors earlier this week as they performed in the Saudi capital Riyadh. 

The French army general charged with the rebuilding of Paris' fire-ravaged Notre-Dame was rebuked by the government Thursday after telling the chief architect to "shut his mouth" in a sign of tension over the cathedral's future appearance.

Roman Polanski may sue the French newspaper that published accusations he raped a former actress in the 1970s, his lawyer said Sunday, as he comes under renewed fire over the latest claim of sexual assault to emerge against the Oscar-winning director in recent years.