Pope Francis on Tuesday approved a decree declaring slain Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero a martyr for the church.
The cleric, a defender of the poor and vocal critic of the military in El Salvador, was shot dead in 1980 while celebrating mass.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has ordered an investigation into a drawing of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed which appeared in a West Bank newspaper, local media reported Tuesday.
The cartoon, which appeared Sunday in al-Hayat al-Jadida, depicted what appeared to be a giant Mohammed standing on top of the world, sprinkling grains of love and acceptance from a heart-shaped satchel.

The only two surviving bronzes by Italian Renaissance master Michelangelo are thought to have been identified with the help of a tiny clue in a 500-year-old sketch, British researchers said Monday.
The bronzes, "Bacchants Riding On Panthers", date from 1506-08 and show a muscular pair of nude male revellers, arms raised in triumph to the sky, astride snarling panthers.

More than a million Hindus thronged temples throughout Malaysia on Tuesday to celebrate Thaipusam, a colorful annual religious festival in which many display their devotion by piercing their bodies with hooks and skewers.
Celebrations in the capital Kuala Lumpur centered, as they have for 125 years, on the spectacular Batu Caves complex on the city's outskirts, which many Hindus walked up to ten hours to reach in an annual pilgrimage.

A senior European commissioner warned Monday about rising levels of extremism and intolerance across the 28-nation bloc, targeting Jews, Muslims, homosexuals and even women.
"There is rising anti-Semitism, there is rising Islamophobia, there is rising homophobia," Frans Timmermans, deputy to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told parliamentarians from EU states meeting in Latvia's capital Riga.

Two sculptures that languished in obscurity for more than a century may be the only surviving bronze works by Michelangelo, researchers announced in Britain on Monday.
The international research team led by Britain's University of Cambridge and the Fitzwilliam Museum uncovered new evidence linking the two nude works to Michelangelo, whose famed works include the painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Programming at a pan-Arab news channel owned by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal was unavailable on Monday, hours after its first transmission from Bahrain.
The satellite feed of Alarab News Channel showed only promotional material, and an Alarab executive declined to comment.

The four surviving original Magna Carta copies go on display together for the first time from Monday as Britain kicks off 800th anniversary celebrations for a contract with global significance.
Considered the cornerstone of liberty, modern democracy, justice and the rule of law, the 1215 English charter forms the basis for legal systems around the world, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the U.S. constitution.

A "detoother" or a "dentist" is a gold-digger looking for a wealthy partner, while "spewing out buffalos" means you can't speak proper English. And a "side-dish" isn't served by a waiter.
Those and other terms are articles in Uganda's strange, often funny locally-adapted English known as "Uglish," which is now published for the first time in dictionary form.

From exorcism ceremonies to spirit houses and amulets claiming to make wearers bullet-proof, Thailand is a culture soaked in superstition -- an obsession critics say is holding the nation back.
On a popular episode of "Humans defy ghosts" -- a weekly Thai TV programme that delves into the supernatural -- a two-year-old girl who survived three days next to the dead body of her mother was asked a series of questions by one of the show's panellists.
