A new book imagining a future France coming under Islamic rule hits French bookshops on Wednesday in a literary sweep likely to fuel creeping European angst about Muslim immigration.

The novel, "Soumission" ("Submission"), is guaranteed to become an instant bestseller because of its author: Michel Houellebecq, a star French writer who has found worldwide fame with cynical works portraying an imploding society with dry humor and graphic sexuality.

Hundreds of thousands of people crowded the streets of Madrid Monday in a flurry of confetti and soap bubbles to greet the three wise men in one of dozens of Epiphany feast parades held across Spain.

Carriages decorated with palm fronds, glitter and lights paraded from Madrid's Nuevo Ministerios toward the central Plaza de Cibeles square, in the largest of Spain's annual processions which was broadcast live across the country on public television.

The brutal killing of a bull in a popular festival in a town in northern Colombia has sparked indignation and calls for a public debate on traditions involving animal cruelty.

Animal rights activists and even some government officials are demanding legal action after a video appeared in Colombia showing dozens of people in Turbaco chasing the bull and killing it with machetes, rocks, knives and kicks. The killing took place during a "corraleja," or amateur bullfighting event held in some towns in the South American country.

A French appeals court on Monday blocked the renovation of the iconic former Parisian department store La Samaritaine, saying its modern makeover would clash with its historic surroundings.

Perched on the right bank of the Seine, the hulking store occupies some of the choicest Parisian real estate but was shut down in 2005 when it ran afoul of health and safety regulations.

Artistic treasures from Asia's past have found a place online after the Freer and Sackler galleries in Washington released its entire 40,000-piece collection on the Internet.

The museum is the first in the Smithsonian network to digitize and release its entire collection, which also includes a large number of works by the American painter James Whistler.

A low-caste transgender in central India has become the country's first to win civic polls and be declared mayor.

Madhu Bai Kinnar won the municipal election in Raigarh in the central state of Chhattisgarh Sunday, beating her rival from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by more than 4,500 votes, according to the state election commission. 

Czech archaeologists have unearthed the tomb of a previously unknown queen believed to have been the wife of Pharaoh Neferefre who ruled 4,500 years ago, officials in Egypt said Sunday.

The tomb was discovered in Abu Sir, an Old Kingdom necropolis southwest of Cairo where there are several pyramids dedicated to pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty, including Neferefre.

Defense lawyers for 26 Egyptians accused of "debauchery" at a Cairo bathhouse challenged police procedures in the case on Sunday.

The men were arrested on December 7 in a night raid on a hammam in the Azbakeya district of the capital.

A letter sent by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in 1964 declining the Nobel Prize for Literature came too late to avert one of the biggest debacles in its history, Swedish media reported Saturday.

Sartre's letter arrived nearly a month after he had been picked as the top choice by the Nobel Committee, the daily Svenska Dagbladet reported, based on archival material made available at the end of a customary 50-year period of secrecy.

Turkey's Islamic-rooted government has authorized the building of the first church in the country in nearly a century, officials said Saturday.

The church is for the tiny Syriac community in Turkey and will be built in the Istanbul suburb of Yesilkoy on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, which already has Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic churches.