A few years after the Taliban were ousted in 2001, and with Afghanistan still in ruins, Ahmad Sarmast left his home in Melbourne, Australia, on a mission: to revive music in the country of his birth.

The school he founded was a unique experiment in inclusiveness for the war-ravaged nation — with orphans and street kids in the student body, it sought to bring a measure of joy back to Kabul. The Taliban had notoriously banned music.

Every day for a year, a Japanese diplomat has posted a near-identical Instagram video of the paper crane he has folded that day.

"Today is my 365th day in Seattle," says Hisao Inagaki, consul general in the western US city, in a video posted Friday.

Do you want to buy a more than 5,000-year-old Sumerian tablet, listed as the property of a gentleman from Sussex in England and passed down as a family heirloom?

On auction site liveauctioneers.com, bidding for the Sumerian clay tablet starts at 550 pounds ($750).

Few tourists are gazing at the Mona Lisa or wandering the streets of Paris this summer, dashing hopes that the top tourist destination would see brighter days after last year's pandemic-linked desertion.

Life is returning to normal for some Afghans in the capital, although Kabul's normally crowded streets appear empty of their usual traffic congestion.

The Taliban have not imposed any restrictions on people so far, as they prepare for Friday prayers. Having a long beard and wearing traditional hats and clothes were required while the group was ruling the country in the late 90s.

Archaeologists in the ancient city of Pompeii have discovered a remarkably well-preserved skeleton during excavations of a tomb that also shed light on the cultural life of the city before it was destroyed by a volcanic eruption in AD 79.

White hair and part of an ear, along with bones and fabric fragments, were found in the tomb in the necropolis of Porta Sarno, an area not yet open to the public that is located in the east of Pompeii's urban center. The discovery is unusual since most adults were cremated at the time.

Maki Kaji, the creator of the popular numbers puzzle Sudoku whose life's work was spreading the joy of puzzles, has died, his Japanese company said Tuesday. He was 69 and had bile duct cancer.

Known as the "Godfather of Sudoku," Kaji created the puzzle to be easy for children and others who didn't want to think too hard. Its name is made up of the Japanese characters for "number" and "single," and players place the numbers 1 through 9 in rows, columns and blocks without repeating them.

Germany on Friday commemorated 60 years since the day East German authorities started building the Berlin Wall, where at least 140 people were killed over three decades trying to flee to the west.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called its construction from Aug. 13, 1961, onward the "beginning of the end" for the communist regime, which claimed at the time that the wall was designed to protect the country from fascism.

The British Embassy Beirut has announced the opening of applications for Chevening Scholarships to study in the UK between 3 August and 2 November 2021, with applications to be submitted via www.chevening.org/apply

Indonesia's army has stopped imposing so-called "virginity tests" on female recruits, its chief said Thursday, following calls from rights groups to ban the invasive vaginal exams.

The military had long defended the unscientific "two-finger test" to check if a cadet's hymen was intact as a way to weed out recruits whose past sexual behavior, they said, would damage its image.