A property developer in Germany at the center of running protests over part of the once-detested Berlin Wall being knocked down said on Monday that the dismantling had been temporarily halted.

While dozens of protestors again gathered at the Wall's longest surviving stretch, Maik Uwe Hinkel, the head of the company Living Bauhaus, said in a German newspaper that he was open to compromise.

A group of South Korean women forced into wartime sexual slavery by Japan filed a defamation suit Monday against a little known, far-right Japanese rock band for calling them prostitutes.

A CD containing a song with the allegedly defamatory lyrics by the band "Scramble" was mailed -- along with a translated text -- to a shelter caring for so-called "comfort women" in Gwangju, south of Seoul, last week.

Brazil's rising economic prosperity is transforming the lives of millions of domestic workers, who are abandoning jobs cooking and cleaning in homes to find other employment.

In this huge South American country, 6.1 million women are domestic helpers, representing about 15 percent of the country's female labor force, according to a 2011 survey by the country's National Statistics Bureau IBGE.

Vienna's Kunstkammer gallery opened Friday after a 10-year restoration with an exhibition featuring a golden sculpture thought to be the world's most precious salt cellar.

Crowds flocked to see the over 2,000 treasures from the Habsburg collections, from tapestries and bronze statuettes to intricate works of gold, silver and ivory, and exotic objects including the alleged horn of a unicorn.

The Catholic Church has time-honored answers to the centuries-old question of how to run its affairs between popes.

The period known as "Sede Vacante" ("Vacant See") lasts between the death -- or in this highly unusual case the resignation -- of a pope until his successor is elected.

Damage wreaked on the Statue of Liberty by Hurricane Sandy has yet to be fully repaired, and it remains unclear when the New York icon will again welcome tourists from around the world.

"We do not have a reopening timeline yet," said spokeswoman Linda Friar of the National Park Service, the U.S. government agency that oversees the statue and the small island in New York harbor on which it stands.

Though armed Islamists have left their town, the grand old families of Timbuktu are still wary of revealing the secret of how they safeguarded thousands of ancient manuscripts from destruction by extremists.

Before they fled the fabled desert town in northern Mali at the end of January, the Islamists sacked part of the public Ahmed Baba Centre library, burning some 3,000 documents they considered sacrilegious.

Hussein Abdullah clutches his oud, long the symbol of Iraqi music, and sighs. "Iraqis do not care for their musical heritage," he laments. "On TV, all you see are singers who have no voice."

While his contemporaries may have chosen to play the drums or guitar, or belt out modern lyrics, the 25-year-old has instead opted for the oud, part of an attempted revival of Iraqi traditional music, long in decline.

The Vatican post office Friday issued a set of stamps for use during the "Sede Vacante", or Vacant See, created by the historic resignation of pope Benedict XVI.

The unusual interregnum stamps, a series of four, include the Vacant See symbol -- a striped umbrella over crossed keys -- as well as the words Sede Vacante, Citta del Vaticano and MMXIII, the year in Roman numerals.

Picture-postcard Guanabara Bay is the main attraction of the Olympic city's newest cultural center.

The Rio Art Museum commands a view of the bay's azure waters, and its exhibitions feature image after image of the bay, with 18th century maps, 19th century paintings and contemporary photos showcasing its watery expanse, its fringe of tropical vegetation and its iconic Sugarloaf Mountain.