Near Iraq's northernmost point, close to Turkey and Iran, a national park of snow-capped peaks and forested valleys is drawing tourists and researchers keen to explore a hardly touched land.

But this region of outstanding natural beauty has also been scarred by war, and local officials are grappling with the problem of minefields left over from years of conflict.

Green and left-wing lawmakers on Wednesday nominated U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden for the European Parliament's prestigious Sakharov human rights prize.

Snowden, who has sought asylum in Russia, "deserves to be honored for shedding light on the systematic infringements of civil liberties by U.S. and European secret services," leaders of the parliament's Greens group Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rebecca Harms said in a statement.

Officials in Quebec Tuesday presented their controversial bid to ban religious apparel -- including headscarves, turbans and yarmulkes -- on public sector workers, part of an overhaul to the Canadian province's "Charter of Values."

The reforms are a response to the "crisis of religious accommodation" granted to ethnic minorities that has "created tensions between Quebecers of different backgrounds and faiths," the minister in charge of the issue, Bernard Drainville, said at a press conference.

In this day of multiplexes and 3-D projection, the Chuan Mei theater in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan is a reminder of the way movie-going used to be.

Instead of computer-generated tickets and plush-sofa-like seats, patrons are given hand-stamped pieces of paper indicating the time of their performance and seated on simple metal chairs.

Poland's Muslim community on Tuesday said a controversial nationwide ban on halal and kosher slaughter, which has spurred intense debate at home and abroad, was invalid under European law.

The EU directive "applies in Poland and in this case it supersedes national law," Poland's top Muslim leader, Mufti Tomasz Miskiewicz, said, quoting an expert legal analysis commissioned by the Muslim community and the meat industry.

The glory of the male form is the focus of Paris's Musee d'Orsay program this autumn, with hundreds of naked men waiting to adorn its illustrious walls: all in the name of art, of course.

The "Masculin/Masculin" exhibition will exhibit 200 works about male nudes from as far back as 1800, and the art crowd in the French capital is already buzzing about the "out of favour" male physique finally going on show in one of the world's greatest museums.

The number of Britons who are religious has declined significantly in the last 30 years and the number of adherents to the established Church of England has halved, a survey revealed on Tuesday.

Just 52 percent of people said they belong to a religion, down from 68 percent in 1983, according to the latest British Social Attitudes survey, which has been conducted every year for the last three decades.

The Swiss parliament voted Tuesday to raise the legal prostitution age from 16 to 18, tightening the country's liberal sex-trade laws to bring them in line with European standards.

The lower house of parliament voted to change the Swiss penal code to make it illegal to pay for sex with a minor, following suit after the upper house adopted the bill.

Women make up only one percent of Afghanistan's police force and as a result women are reluctant to seek justice for rising levels of violence, international aid agency Oxfam said Tuesday.

There is an average of one female police officer for every 10,000 women in Afghanistan, where reports of violence against women rose by 25 percent in 2011-2012, Oxfam said in a report.

The United States returned a Roman wine pitcher and five gold artifacts to Afghanistan on Monday in the fourth official repatriation of stolen Afghan cultural treasures in eight years.

Kabul's ambassador to Washington, Eklil Hakimi, accepted the objects from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency during a ceremony at the Afghan embassy.