Forty years after Cyprus was divided by a bloody conflict, the island's Greek and Turkish communities are trying to overcome their differences and find an unusual common cause: halloumi cheese.

Efforts to have the increasingly popular "squeaky" cheese granted a protected European Union status have raised fears that Turkish Cypriot producers will be excluded.

It is a delicate subject which has been taboo since biblical times but now an Israeli documentary has broken new ground by exploring the ultra-Orthodox Jewish ban on masturbation.

"Sacred Sperm" was born from the worries of a religiously observant father, Ori Gruder, who did not know how to talk to his 10-year-old son about the act of masturbation or sex in general. 

Germany's economy minister on Monday rejected calls by Greece's new prime minister for Berlin to pay reparations for World War II damages by the Nazis, insisting the issue was concluded 25 years ago.

"The likelihood is zero," Sigmar Gabriel, who is also Germany's vice-chancellor, said at a gathering of his Social Democrats in Brandenburg state near Berlin.

In sky-blue army uniforms emblazoned with red stars, they could be Communist comrades from China's civil war. But in fact the youngsters are the targets of a modern campaign for hearts and minds, with the classroom as its battleground.

"We are the new generation of little Red Army warriors," the children sang, tunics and belts matching the ones donned by Mao Zedong's troops when they marched across China. "We march onwards with incomparable firmness."

Two American sisters have been deported from Cambodia after they were convicted of taking naked photos inside the country's famed Angkor temple complex, officials said on Sunday.

Lindsey Adams, 22, and her 20-year-old sister Leslie were discovered taking nude shots of each other inside the Preah Khan temple at the world heritage site on Friday.

Novelist Assia Djebar, an ardent defender of women's rights in her native Algeria, has died aged 78, state radio said Saturday.

The French-language author and filmmaker, who was seen as a contender for the Nobel literature prize in recent years, died on Friday in a hospital in Paris.

In a small South Carolina city, a war memorial honoring fallen World War I and II soldiers divides them into two categories: "white" and "colored."

Welborn Adams, Greenwood's white Democratic-leaning mayor, believes the bronze plaques are relics of the South's scarred racial past and should be changed in the spirit of equality, replaced like the "colored" water fountains or back entrances to the movie theater that blacks were once forced to use.

Muslim and Christian leaders warned of growing fear Friday among India's religious minorities after U.S. President Barack Obama said Mahatma Gandhi would have been shocked by communal violence in the mainly Hindu country.

Only days after warning in New Delhi about the need to promote religious tolerance, Obama invoked the memory of India's independence icon to drive home a similar appeal during a speech in Washington on Thursday.

The Spanish city of Cordoba boasts that different faiths have long co-existed there, but locals are now squabbling over its star tourist attraction: a cathedral that was once a mosque.

One of the most famous Islamic monuments in Europe, the grand stone edifice dominates the old center of the city in the southern Andalucia region.

French archaeologists protesting the privatization of their profession gave visitors free entry to the renowned Louvre museum in Paris Thursday.

Around 100 protesters blocked the ticketing area for around four hours in the afternoon, said union member Fabrice Marty.