The Vatican said Tuesday it agreed with Spain's efforts to find an alternative to the Madrid cathedral as a place to rebury late dictator Francisco Franco, once he is exhumed from his vast mausoleum.

A nine-year-old Moroccan girl on Tuesday won $136,000 (120,000 euros) in an Arabic-language reading competition organized by the Dubai government. 

Thousands of police officers guarded the world's biggest statue ahead of its inauguration by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, anticipating protests by angry locals displaced by the enormous figure.

A 15-minute walk from the Iraqi border in the west Iranian town of Mehran, three young clerics are hard at work polishing the shoes of pilgrims. 

Millions of Shiite Muslims from around the world are making their way this week to their sect's holy shrines in the Iraqi city of Karbala, a pilgrimage that is as much about community as it is about religion.

The shrines are of two revered Shiite imams: Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and his half-brother Abbas. The annual commemoration, called Arbaeen, draws more pilgrims each year — according to Iraqi figures — than the hajj in Saudi Arabia, a pilgrimage required once in a lifetime of every Muslim who can afford it and is physically able to make it.

Pope Francis has vowed to end clerical sexual abuse, but bishops from Asia and Africa have shown a mixed response to a scandal some have termed a "Western problem".

Syria reopened a wing of the capital's famed antiquities museum on Sunday after six years of closure to protect its exhibits from rebel rocket fire in the civil war.

Officials swung open the large wooden door of the building in central Damascus for the first time since 2012.

Irish voters were deciding Friday whether to repeal a ban on blasphemy -- the latest potential reform distancing the once-devout nation from its Catholic past.

The referendum was being held alongside a presidential election in which incumbent Michael Higgins was expected to secure a new seven-year term in the largely ceremonial post.

Russian police dismiss victims of domestic violence and a recent softening of the law in this area has left women even more vulnerable, a Human Rights Watch report said Thursday.

The report, based on interviews with dozens of victims, details extreme assaults including women being choked, punched and burned by their attackers. Others were pushed off balconies and out of windows.

A treasure trove of some 2,000 gold and silver coins has been found on the Danube riverbed in Hungary thanks to an exceptionally low water level, archaeologists said Thursday.