Moviemaker Francis Ford Coppola and opera singer Placido Domingo are among five winners of a lucrative award that has been dubbed the "Nobel Prize of the arts."

British sculptor Antony Gormley, Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto and British architect David Chipperfield were also announced Tuesday as winners of the Japan Art Association's Praemium Imperiale Awards, which come with a 15 million yen ($150,000) purse.

Britain was dragged into a debate Tuesday on Muslim women wearing full-face veils in public, with its biggest selling newspaper adding to calls from politicians to join European countries that have banned its use.

The topic had stayed below the British political radar until the past week when a judge ruled that a Muslim woman will be allowed to go on wearing a veil but must take it off while giving evidence at her trial.

Pope Francis on Monday called for "another way" of treating divorcees who remarry -- a thorny issue since Catholics who wed a second time are currently not allowed to receive Holy Communion at mass.

Catholic faithful should "feel at home" in parishes and those who have remarried should be treated with "justice", the pope was quoted as saying by Romasette, the local newspaper for the diocese of Rome.

The violin played by the bandmaster of the Titanic as the liner sank beneath the waves is to go on display at a museum marking the tragedy in Northern Ireland, officials said Monday.

The instrument belonging to Wallace Hartley was found strapped to his body after he drowned with some 1,500 others on board the supposedly unsinkable ship in 1912.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh vowed Monday severely to punish those to blame for recent Hindu-Muslim clashes that left 49 people dead, as he met people displaced by the violence.

Singh said his government would work with local authorities to help victims of the unrest, which erupted earlier this month in the village of Muzaffarnagar in India's most populous state Uttar Pradesh.

The billionaire media mogul who brought Miss World to Indonesia lashed out at the government Monday for bowing to Muslim hardline pressure by moving the entire beauty pageant to Bali.

But Hary Tanoesoedibjo, head of MNC media group, the local organizer of the event, conceded the whole contest would now be held on the Hindu-majority island as there was no other option but to follow the authorities' orders.

Relatives have shot dead three women in a lawless tribal area of northwest Pakistan after one of them left her husband, officials said Monday.

The "honor" killings happened in Jawaki village in the Darra Adam Khel district, between the cities of Peshawar and Kohat.

An Australian inquiry into church and institutional child abuse began public hearings Monday, with warnings that widespread and "shocking" allegations would be heard against places of worship, orphanages, community groups and schools.

Justice Peter McClellan opened the hearings in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, announced by the government last November, saying that thousands of people had so far come forward.

Perched away from the world on the rocky southern tip of Africa, the town of Hermanus rose to global whale-watching renown almost by chance.

Two decades ago, as South Africa emerged from apartheid-induced isolation, pop zoologist Mark Carwardine visited Hermanus while researching a book on the world's best spots to watch whales.

Slovenia's prime minister, Alenka Bratusek, on Saturday laid the foundation stone for what will be the country's first mosque -- 44 years after the initial request to build it was made.

The laying of the stone, in the presence of a government minister from Qatar which is helping to fund the project, was a "symbolic victory against all forms of religious intolerance", said Bratusek, adding that Europe would not be as culturally rich without Islam.