The majority-Catholic Philippines told Muslim teachers Tuesday to remove their veils inside classrooms, in part to promote better relationships between teachers and pupils.

Education Secretary Armin Luistro said the move was part of reforms to make schools more sensitive to religion.

Bodvalenke may be desperately poor, but some colorful murals depicting folk tales and figures from Roma legends are generating hope, inspiration and tourist money for the small Hungarian village.

"The concept is simple. Roma artists from Hungary and beyond come here to paint wonderful frescoes on houses," said Eszter Pasztor, a non-Roma translator and interpreter from Budapest who launched the project in 2009.

With trowels and paintbrushes, dozens of archaeologists in white hard-hats patiently sift the reddish-brown earth in the caves of Atapuerca, searching for remains a million years old.

From under strata spanning hundreds of millenia at this site in northern Spain, they unearth ancient mouse bones and the teeth of horses -- but what they most hope for is a sign of prehistoric humans that could write a new chapter in our evolution.

The publisher that bought the German rights to a novel for a song before learning that the author was Harry Potter writer J.K. Rowling said Sunday it was eyeing a windfall.

Munich-based Blanvalet Verlag snapped up the rights in February to "The Cuckoo's Calling", a purported debut novel by a certain Robert Galbraith about a private detective who investigates a model's suicide, its editor Anja Franzen told news weekly Focus.

Sixty years ago, as the Iron Curtain sealed off Eastern Europe, Teodor Stanca was among millions sentenced to jail, death or forced labor for opposing Communist rule.

Today, as survivors of this dark page of history are getting older and fewer, 80-year-old Stanca says he hopes a Romanian jail-turned-museum will remind future generations that "freedom needs eternal vigilance".

An Italian woman who suffered from severe hypertension was cured after visiting Lourdes in 1989, the 69th such miracle to take place at the fabled French shrine, a Catholic official said Sunday.

Giovanni Giudici, bishop of Pavia, where Danila Castelli lives, recognized the event as a miracle last month, but flooding at the religious site in southwest France prevented the Lourdes sanctuary from publishing the news earlier.

Sunni Muslim extremists and Shiite Zaidi rebels in Yemen are waging a battle for the control of mosques, in a spillover of the sectarian face-off rattling the Middle East.

The showdown was previously confined to the northern province of Saada, stronghold of Zaidi Ansarullah rebels who have since last year frequently clashed with supporters of the Sunni Islamist party Al-Islah.

Some 7,500 gay rights supporters and activists marched through the French port of Marseille on Saturday at the start of Europride 2013.

Under a banner proclaiming "Europe marches towards equality", they made their way from the city's old port to the beach amid celebrations for the beginning of the 10-day festival devoted to the lesbian and gay cause.

Tribal elders and Islamic clerics in northwest Pakistan have barred women from shopping in bazaars without a male relative, elders and an official said Saturday.

The decision was taken on Friday in the Karak district of conservative Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders the restive tribal areas along the Afghan border.

The white sands of Copacabana beach typically draw millions of sun-worshippers, New Year's Eve revelers and fans for free concerts by the likes of Stevie Wonder and the Rolling Stones. In the coming week, the star of the show is infinitely less flamboyant than Mick Jagger, but he promises to stir up just as much passion among devotees.

Pope Francis, the 76-year-old Argentine who became the church's first pontiff from the Americas in March, will turn the crescent-shaped shoreline into a giant stage for his first international trip as pope, returning to the embrace of Latin America to preside over the Roman Catholic Church's World Youth Day festival.