Iranian police have swooped in to shutter a fried chicken shop using the brand name of U.S. fast food giant KFC, local media said Tuesday.

"Police closed the 'KFC' restaurant as it didn't have authorization and had been operating under a false license," reported the news site of Iran's Young Journalist Club, which is affiliated with state television. 

Nepal's first international photo festival opened on Tuesday on the streets of the quake-devastated Kathmandu Valley, with exhibits set up alongside damaged and spectacular temples and palaces.

The Photo Kathmandu festival takes visitors on a tour of the historic city of Patan, past intricately-carved statues and ancient water spouts, and chronicles Nepal's chaotic transformation from a Hindu monarchy to a secular republic.

South Korea on Tuesday pushed ahead with a highly controversial plan to introduce government-issued history textbooks in schools, despite angry protests by opposition parties and academics.

The policy has become a bitter ideological battleground between left and right in South Korea, with critics accusing President Park Geun-Hye's administration of seeking to deliberately manipulate and distort the narrative of how the South Korean state was created.

Its elaborate Baroque facade now sparkles in the sun, scaffold-free: Rome's Trevi Fountain will gush its emerald waters once again Tuesday after a clean-up funded by Italian fashion house Fendi.

Crowds of frustrated tourists have spent months peeking at bits of the monument from a special walkway put in over the fountain while repairs were carried out to the tune of over 2.0 million euros ($2.2 million).

As children elsewhere celebrate Halloween in fancy costume dress, for the Misak people of southeastern Colombia the coming of November is a solemn occasion to honor the dead.

Of the scores of indigenous groups in Colombia, the Misak are considered to have best conserved their ancestral traditions, which at the coming of winter means making offerings to their ancestors.

Writer Mathias Enard won France's top literary prize Tuesday in a race dominated by books about West's love-hate relationship with Islam and the Arab world.

A scholar of both Arabic and Persian, Barcelona-based Enard, 43, wove a poetic eulogy to the long history of cultural exchanges between East and West in "Boussole" ("Compass"), and had been the critics' favorite for the award.

Prosecutors deliberately kept African Americans off the all-white jury that sent a black man to death row, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Monday, in a case alleging widespread racial bias in the nation's judicial system.

Timothy Foster, who has spent nearly 30 years on Georgia's death row, was convicted of the 1986 murder of an elderly white woman, Queen Madge White.

Israel's far-right Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel has infuriated animal lovers by suggesting that the country's millions of stray cats and dogs be deported rather than castrated.

Ariel wrote to Environment Minister Avi Gabai proposing that the budget allocated to castration be used "to deport them to a foreign country", Yediot Aharonot newspaper reported Monday.

Michelle Obama arrived Monday in Qatar on the opening stage of her first solo Middle East tour, where she is expected to call for addressing "cultural beliefs" obstructing girls' education. 

The U.S. first lady is set to speak at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) on Wednesday, as part of her well-publicized efforts to promote girls' education globally.

Northern Ireland's assembly on Monday voted in favor of same-sex marriage for the first time -- by just one vote -- but the ruling Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) sank the motion with a constitutional veto.

The power-sharing assembly had voted narrowly against the legalization on four previous occasions, but the tables turned ever so slightly with Monday's vote, when it prevailed by 53 votes to 52.