Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday defended individual rights and freedoms while touting cultural diversity and tolerance when asked about a controversy swirling in France over a burkini ban.

"We should be past tolerance in Canada," Trudeau told reporters after meeting with his ministers to plan the government's legislative agenda.

Burkini bans in France have boosted sales and interest in the full-bodied Islamic swimsuit, particularly from non-Muslim women, the Australian-Lebanese woman credited with creating the design said Tuesday.

A Malaysian court Monday remanded a rap artist in custody for a music video entitled "Oh my God" which allegedly insults Islam because it was partly filmed in a mosque.

Almost half of the women working for Australia's national police force say they have been sexually harassed on the job, according to a report released Monday calling for urgent change.

Tourists who suffer from vertigo need not apply. The world's highest and longest glass-bottomed bridge opened Saturday in China's spectacular Zhangjiajie mountains -- the inspiration for American blockbuster Avatar.

From Mali to Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, Islamist fighters have regularly turned their sights on the priceless vestiges of peoples' cultural heritage -- for being un-Islamic.

Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, whose war crimes trial in The Hague opens on Monday, is a quiet Koranic scholar turned ruthless enforcer for jihadists when they occupied the fabled Malian city of Timbuktu.

Colombia started circulating a new 50,000-peso banknote on Friday bearing the likeness of late Nobel-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The light purple piece of money, worth the equivalent of $17.40, "pays honor to a person who carried Colombia's name far and wide from the middle of the last century," the head of the country's central bank, Jose Dario Uribe, said.

It's one of the world's most mysterious books, a centuries-old manuscript written in an unknown or coded language that no one -- not even the best cryptographers -- has cracked.

Germany's interior minister on Friday proposed partially banning the full-face burqa Islamic veil, as a debate on integration rages after two jihadist attacks and ahead of key state elections.

The call by Thomas de Maiziere comes as Chancellor Angela Merkel's government attempts to address public fears surrounding last year's record influx of nearly 1.1 million migrants and refugees, most from predominantly Muslim countries.