In a tiny workshop in Lebanon's Tripoli, coffin maker Michel Homsi takes a drag on a cigarette, surrounded by his carefully crafted handiwork, waiting for customers that never seem to arrive.

Every day is the same. He wakes at 6:45 am, eats breakfast 20 minutes later and reports for work at eight o'clock sharp. But this isn't your typical Japanese salaryman.

Saudi Arabia's highest-ranking cleric has warned of the "depravity" of cinemas and music concerts, saying they would corrupt morals if allowed in the ultra-conservative kingdom.

"We know that singing concerts and cinemas are a depravity," Grand Mufti Abdulaziz al-Sheikh said in a television interview cited by Sabq news website late Friday.

Two Italian teenagers who have confessed to the brutal ax murder of the parents of one of them were regular cannabis users and video game obsessives, it emerged Friday as the country asked itself what led to the tragedy.

Morocco's ban on the sale and production of burqa full-face Muslim veils beloved of Salafists has sharply divided opinions in the North African country.

Brick by brick, plank by plank, workers at the former Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau carefully clean its barracks to preserve the Holocaust symbol for future generations. 

"This is the largest preservation project in the history of the museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It's unprecedented," museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki told AFP. 

China has ordered all schools to teach pupils that its 20th-century war with Japan lasted 14 years rather than eight, the education ministry said Wednesday, to "strengthen patriotic education."

Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, who was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 130,000 Jews, died in 2001 at the age of 89, locked up in a squalid Damascus basement, a French magazine reported Wednesday.

Muslim parents in Switzerland cannot refuse to send their daughters to school-run swimming lessons with boys, Europe's top rights court said Tuesday, dismissing a challenge by a Turkish-Swiss couple claiming the rule violated their beliefs.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) accepted that the refusal by Swiss authorities to exempt the couple's two daughters from the compulsory lessons interfered with their freedom of religion.

The chilly December wind whipped rain across the strewn wreckage of a city that, nearly 3,000 years ago, ruled almost the entire Middle East. Rivulets of water ran through the dirt, washing away chunks of ancient stone.

The city of Nimrud in northern Iraq is in pieces, victim of the Islamic State group's fervor to erase history. The remains of its palaces and temples, once lined in brilliant reliefs of gods and kings, have been blown up. The statues of winged bulls that once guarded the site are hacked to bits. Its towering ziggurat, or step pyramid, has been bulldozed.