Fifty years ago Thursday a beach ball-sized satellite carried the first television images across the Atlantic, kicking off a new era of global communications decades before the Internet.

The Telstar satellite -- built by Bell Telephone Laboratories for use by AT&T -- was also the first privately sponsored space mission, and was seen as part of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Seoul's last old-style, one-screen cinema, soon to be knocked down and replaced by a hotel, played its final movie Wednesday — the Italian classic "The Bicycle Thief" — a moment so emotional for the theater operator that she publicly shaved her head in frustration.

The theater, which opened in 1964, had become a place where mostly elderly moviegoers gathered regularly to watch classic Hollywood and South Korean films and indulge in nostalgia for cinematic days gone by.

Two women plan to tie the knot next month in Taiwan's first same-sex Buddhist wedding, as gay and lesbian groups push to make the island the first society in Asia to legalize gay marriage.

Fish Huang and her partner You Ya-ting, both 30, will receive their blessings from Master Shih Chao-hui at a Buddhist monastery in north Taiwan's Taoyuan county on August 11.

Bosnia remembers the Srebrenica massacre on Wednesday with the two alleged masterminds, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, finally on trial.

But for many of the survivors and relatives of the thousands of victims of the mass killings -- Europe's worst single atrocity since World War II -- the pursuit of justice is just too little, too late.

When Simon McBurney fled Thatcherite Britain in the 1980s he found a spiritual home in Paris. Back in France as guest artist at the Avignon festival, the actor-director opened the event with a bang.

McBurney's version of Mikhail Bulgakov's Soviet satire "The Master and Margarita" opened the three-week extravaganza on Saturday night, before 2,000 people in the court of honor of the southeastern city's historic Papal Palace.

Workers have occupied the famous Cinecitta film studios in Rome where classics like "Quo Vadis" and "Cleopatra" were shot in a protest against a major renovation project, trade unionists said on Monday.

"Dozens of workers and artisans will be forced to leave," Alberto Manzini, a regional official from Italy's biggest trade union, CGIL, told Agence France Presse.

South Sudan has put aside dire warnings over the stability and economic viability of the fledgling nation, the world's newest, to celebrate its first year of independence.

Crowds took to the streets of the capital Juba on Monday, with people crammed into cars driving around the city and honking horns to mark the first anniversary since separating from former civil war foes Sudan.

The Indian government has stepped in to buy a collection of thousands of letters, papers and photos relating to Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi ahead of its planned auction in London.

The archive, which belonged to Gandhi's close friend Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jewish bodybuilder and architect, was to have gone under the hammer at Sotheby's on Tuesday.

Russian-born author Olga Martynova was awarded Sunday the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann prize for literature, a major German-language award, the jury announced.

The 50-year-old Martynova, who is now based in Germany, was selected for the 25,000-euro ($30,000) prize for her story about a young boy entitled "Ich werde sagen: 'Hi!'" ("I will say: Hi!").

France and Germany marked 50 years of reconciliation, their leaders stressing the ties that unite the two countries and condemning news of the desecration of dozens of German war graves.

The vandalism of more than 40 graves of German soldiers killed during World War I came on the eve of the highly symbolic meeting in Reims in northern France, a region scarred by centuries of war with Germany.