Frederic and Anne-Laure Pascal are devout Roman Catholics who built their lives around their religion. When she lost her job last year, the young couple decided on an unlikely expression of their religious commitment: a worldwide "interfaith pilgrimage" to places where peace has won out over dueling dogmas.

Since October, the French couple has visited 11 nations from Iraq to Malaysia in an odyssey to find people of all creeds who have dedicated their lives to overcoming religious intolerance in some of the world's most divided and war-torn corners.

Thai censors banned a film based on William Shakespeare's "Macbeth", saying the tale could sow "disunity" in the politically divided kingdom.

In the play, a power-hungry general kills the King of Scotland to take the throne for himself.

Sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, a U.S. expatriate renowned for her dignified portrayals of African-American and Mexican women and who was barred from her home country for political activism during the McCarthy era, has died at the age of 96, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Maria Antonieta Alvarez, Catlett's daughter-in-law, said the artist died Monday in a house in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she had lived since 1976.

An extremely rare Chinese porcelain bowl fetched nearly $27 million -- smashing pre-sale estimates by about three times -- at a hotly anticipated Sotheby's auction in Hong Kong, the Agence France Presse said Wednesday.

The modest-looking imperial ceramic bowl that was made around 900 years ago had been expected to fetch up to HK$80 million, but it was snapped up by an unidentified telephone bidder for HK$208 million ($26.7 million).

Six galleries in Australia Wednesday joined the Google Art Project, which provides an online platform to view thousands of artworks in detail from anywhere in the world.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales will have 415 of its key works available for viewing. More than 250 of these will be accessible via the 3D museum-view walkthrough.

Most people associate the drama of the Titanic with icebergs, lifeboats, and flares fired into the night. Few think of the heartbreak that took place as news of the tragedy filtered home.

A tiny Slavic minority in Germany is keeping alive a long and intricate tradition of hand-painting Easter eggs with the help of feathers and wax.

Shortly after Christmas every year, Karin Hannusch gets to work decorating up to 600 eggs for the annual Easter market in Schleife, a center of the small Sorbian community.

Auctioneers in Hong Kong sold 10 paintings seized from a South Korean bank that collapsed amid a corruption scandal to raise $2.4 million to help repay depositors, the Associated Presse said Tuesday.

Contemporary paintings by Chinese and Western artists were among the works that went on the block, including works by noted Chinese artists Zeng Fanzhi and Zhang Xiaogang and American Julian Schnabel.

Neslisah Sultan, the oldest member of the dynasty that ruled the former Ottoman empire, has died at the age of 91, Turkish media reported Tuesday.

The granddaughter of the last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI, died on Monday and will be buried in the former Ottoman capital later Tuesday after a religious ceremony, the Agence France Presse reported Tuesday.

Iranians flocked to parks and orchards to mark Sizdeh Bedar, an ancient festival that predates Islam and goes back thousands of years to the time when Zoroastrianism was the predominant religion of Persia.

Iran's hard-line ruling clerics have discouraged many pre-Islamic rituals, but they've been unable to put Iranians off the Persian New Year, or Nowruz, and its ending celebration of Sizdeh Bedar.