Spain's second largest city Barcelona on Wednesday said it would soon outlaw street prostitution, imposing fines on both prostitutes and their clients.

The city hall said the new rules were expected to come into play in May.

At least 943 Pakistani women and girls were murdered last year for allegedly defaming their family's honor, the country's leading human rights group said Thursday.

The statistics highlight the growing scale of violence suffered by many women in conservative Muslim Pakistan, where they are frequently treated as second-class citizens and there is no law against domestic violence.

Debt-laden Dubai will build an opera house and an modern art museum, the government said Wednesday, in the first such project since the Gulf emirate was hit by the global economic downturn in 2008.

The Dubai Modern Art Museum & Opera House District "aims to further strengthen UAE's emerging role as the cultural hub of the region," a statement said.

A Bangladesh court on Wednesday ordered authorities to shut down five Facebook pages and a website for blaspheming the Prophet Mohammed, the Koran and other religious subjects, a lawyer said.

Judges at the high court in Dhaka ordered the telecommunications regulator, home ministry officials and police to block the offending pages immediately.

A Japanese university will open a research centre near Peru's Nazca Lines to study the ancient geoglyphs which are designated a UNESCO world heritage site, Kyodo news agency said Wednesday.

The new facility set up by Yamagata University will operate for 15 years to study the large designs etched into the ground in Peru's southern plains, with Japanese and local researchers expected to take part in the project.

A Russian court has upheld a decision to permit the publication of a sacred Hindu text whose initial ban sparked protests in India and threatened to strain Moscow's close ties with New Delhi.

A district court in the Siberian city of Tomsk said in a statement it had decided "to leave unchanged" a December lower court ruling stating that the "Bhagavad Gita" did not contain extremist material.

Several dozen Indonesian women founded the colonization of Madagascar 1,200 years ago, scientists said on Wednesday in a probe into one of the strangest episodes in the human odyssey.

Anthropologists are fascinated by Madagascar, for the island remained aloof from mankind's conquest of the planet for thousands of years.

Animal stars of the Western art canon go on show in Paris from Wednesday, from the first naturalist paintings to Darwinist studies of the animal realm, and modern-day works on biodiversity under threat.

Dating from the Renaissance to the 21st century, 120 paintings, sculptures, bronzes and engravings -- all with animals as their exclusive subjects -- are brought together for the show dubbed "Animal Beauty", at Paris' Grand Palais.

Greece's Bavarian-born King Otto considered offering Britain cash or antiquities in the 19th century in exchange for marbles removed from the Acropolis, previously unpublished historical files have shown.

"There is a document to the foreign ministry, subsequently forwarded to Otto's minister in London, with instructions on how to request the marbles back," Acropolis Museum director Demetrios Pantermalis told a conference on Monday.

Somalia's national theatre reopened in the war-ravaged capital Mogadishu for the first time in 20 years Monday with the president voicing hope it would mark a watershed in the long quest for peace.

"Somalia has historic literary traditions that date back more 700 years... and I feel that resuming such traditions will play a role in the peace process," President Sharif Sheik Ahmed said in a speech at the open-air Chinese-built theatre.