China is discouraging some Muslims in the far western region of Xinjiang from fasting during Ramadan. The government says the move is motivated by health concerns, but others said Friday that it's a risky campaign to secularize the Muslim minority that will likely backfire.

Several city, county and village governments in Xinjiang have posted notices on their websites banning or discouraging Communist Party members, civil servants, students and teachers from fasting during the religious holiday. Muslims around the world abstain from food and drink from dawn to dusk during the 30-day period.

At a packed Hanoi restaurant, one of Vietnam's growing ranks of proud pooch owners tucks into a traditional delicacy to mark the end of the lunar month -- a plate of juicy dog.

Canine meat has long been on the menu in Vietnam. But now a growing love of the four-legged friends means that one man's pet can be another's dog sausage -- quite literally as far as dog bandits are concerned.

South Africa will unveil its latest monument to Nelson Mandela on Saturday, a new statue along a rural highway to mark the spot where he was arrested 50 years ago for his struggle against white rule.

Mandela, now 94, was arrested as a young liberation fighter on August 5, 1962, near the town of Howick, just months after he founded the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC).

The headless remains of infamous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly are to be returned to his descendants for a family burial 132 years after the notorious criminal was executed, officials said Thursday.

The Victorian state government said it had issued a new exhumation license for Kelly's remains, meaning a property developer behind the Pentridge Prison site where he was buried will be forced to hand over the skeleton.

Romanian-born piano prodigy Mihaela Ursuleasa has been found dead in her Vienna apartment after suffering a brain hemorrhage, Vienna police said Friday.

The 33-year-old winner of the prestigious Clara Haskil prize was found in her flat on Thursday morning, police said, adding that any involvement by a third party had been firmly ruled out.

Some of Berlin's most senior squatters are nearly a century old, but age is not stopping the scrappy bunch from fighting impending eviction from their cherished social club.

The cash-strapped authorities in the former communist eastern district of Pankow have said they need to cut around five million euros ($6 million) from their budget and plan to close public facilities to do so.

For the government, it's a target for crisis taxes and cuts like any other: the subsidized arts sector. For actors, artists and audiences, it's Spain's moral lifeblood, bleeding away in the recession.

The arts in Spain -- including the big film sector that gave the world Pedro Almodovar -- is in peril from a sharp rise in sales tax that will drive away audiences, top cultural figures say.

When the guide points out the location of the Hollywood salon where blond bombshell Marilyn Monroe first bleached her hair, a tourist exclaims, "Wow!" with reverence.

August 5 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the legendary sex symbol from an overdose of barbiturates.

Top Nazi war crimes suspect Laszlo Csatary, accused of overseeing the deportation of thousands of Jews to their deaths during World War II, denied all allegations against him at a first hearing before prosecutors in Hungary on Tuesday, his lawyer said.

"Csatary denied all allegations against him," the 97-year-old man's lawyer, Gabor Horvath, told journalists after a three-hour closed-door hearing.

The remains and personal belongings of five American airmen have been recovered from the wreck of a U.S. Air Force plane, almost 70 years after it sank in Canadian waters, a diplomat said Tuesday.

The amphibious plane was accidentally discovered by underwater archeologists in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in 2009 and a 50-person U.S. military team was sent earlier this month to search for the remains of the crash victims.