Venezuela is known for its obsession with beauty contests and plastic surgery. Now, the latest fashion rage is bulletproof clothes and cars to protect against rampant violent crime.

Miguel Caballero, a Colombian designer known for his bulletproof clothing, told AFP that over the past seven months up to 30 percent of his sales are with people sporting his style-meets-safety duds in Venezuela.

Powerful herby coffee, sun-dried fish and succulent beef from Ankole cattle are just some of the Ugandan delicacies in a mushrooming movement across Africa to safeguard traditional foods.

Slow Food, a global grassroots organisation that promotes "good, clean and fair food", is spreading its reach across Africa after making its first inroads on the continent a decade ago.

The Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi offered a peek Sunday of several artworks which will be displayed at its Guggenheim museum, set to open in 2017.

Visitors got a glimpse of 19 out of the 200 artworks acquired by oil-rich Abu Dhabi that will be on public display from Wednesday until January at the museum.

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has chided his country for shirking responsibility for its World War II aggression and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in an interview published Monday.

Speaking to the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, the 65-year-old author said: "No one has taken real responsibility for the 1945 war end or the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. I feel so."

The Israeli cabinet approved a new law Sunday that would enable easier conversions to Judaism, a move advocates hope will encourage hundreds of thousands of "religionless" Israelis to become Jewish.

The new law, a ministerial compromise following a bill initiated by Elazar Stern of Justice Minister Tzipi Livni's HaTnuah movement, stipulates that the chief rabbi of each Israeli city would be able to form and head a conversion court, pending conditions to be set by the chief rabbinate.

North and South Korea have never found dialogue easy, but academics from both sides currently meeting in Pyongyang are trying to steer things in the right direction by at least getting them to speak the same language.

A 25-year old effort to produce a unified Korean language dictionary is, its compilers say, entering the home stretch in its bid to bridge a growing gap in vocabulary, if not ideology.

UNESCO chief Irina Bokova on Sunday slammed the "barbaric" destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage, as jihadists from the Islamic State group destroy age-old sites in areas they control.

Iraq has "thousands of temples, of buildings, of archaeological sites, of objects, that represent a treasure for (all) humanity," Bokova said during a visit to Baghdad.

The Greek Orthodox Church said Friday it would not provide religious rites for those who choose cremation, saying it disrespects the human body.

"The incineration of the body is not in keeping with the traditions and actions of the Church, for anthropological and theological reasons," the Church said in a statement.

A bronze sculpture by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti valued at more than $100 million and 20 works by pop art icon Andy Warhol headline New York's fall art auction season next week.

Art worth at least $1.7 billion from impressionist and modern; post-war and contemporary go under the hammer at Christie's and Sotheby's at combined evening and day sales from November 4 to 12.

Nearly eight decades after she became one of the most famous supporting figures in American popular literature, Mammy has become the heroine of her own story in a prequel to "Gone with the Wind."

"Ruth's Journey" by novelist and poet Donald McCaig comes 75 years after the film version of Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning epic work of fiction set in the Deep South during the US Civil War.