Bolivian President Evo Morales announced Monday he is creating a "green brigade" to prevent anyone from using national parks to grow coca -- the raw material for cocaine, also important in Andean culture.

"I want to warn any fellow in national parks" against the cultivation of coca, the president said in a speech broadcast on radio and television, noting that Bolivia's anti-narcotics laws make it illegal to use ecological reserves for the crop.

Influential Australian art critic, historian and writer Robert Hughes has died aged 74 in New York after a long illness, his family said Tuesday.

Hughes, whom the New York Times once proclaimed the world's most famous art critic, passed away at the Calvary Hospital in the Bronx on Monday.

A new book offers a fresh, youthful and personal twist on Germany's turbulent decades-long division by the Berlin Wall, with true stories depicted through comic illustrations.

Five first-hand accounts by Berliners whose lives were shaped and marked by communist East Germany's decision to divide itself off from the West in 1961 are told in the comic book entitled "Berlin -- Divided City".

Placebo, LMFAO, The Killers and over 150 groups from Hungary, Europe and further afield will grace the stages at Budapest's 20th Sziget Festival on August 6-13, one of Europe's most popular music events.

For the first time, a live stream of the week-long fest -- now one of Hungary's biggest tourist events -- will be available on YouTube, according to its organizers.

Tens of thousands of people marked the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Monday, as a rising tide of anti-nuclear sentiment swells in post-Fukushima Japan.

Ageing survivors, relatives, government officials and foreign delegates attended the annual ceremony at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park commemorating the U.S. bombing of the western Japanese city nearly seven decades ago.

Communist Vietnam is considering legalizing same-sex marriage, which would catapult it to the fore of gay rights in Asia, where traditional values dominate many societies and sodomy is illegal in some.

While homosexuality was once viewed as a "social evil" in the authoritarian nation, it is slowly shedding its taboo status.

China is discouraging some Muslims in the far western region of Xinjiang from fasting during Ramadan. The government says the move is motivated by health concerns, but others said Friday that it's a risky campaign to secularize the Muslim minority that will likely backfire.

Several city, county and village governments in Xinjiang have posted notices on their websites banning or discouraging Communist Party members, civil servants, students and teachers from fasting during the religious holiday. Muslims around the world abstain from food and drink from dawn to dusk during the 30-day period.

At a packed Hanoi restaurant, one of Vietnam's growing ranks of proud pooch owners tucks into a traditional delicacy to mark the end of the lunar month -- a plate of juicy dog.

Canine meat has long been on the menu in Vietnam. But now a growing love of the four-legged friends means that one man's pet can be another's dog sausage -- quite literally as far as dog bandits are concerned.

South Africa will unveil its latest monument to Nelson Mandela on Saturday, a new statue along a rural highway to mark the spot where he was arrested 50 years ago for his struggle against white rule.

Mandela, now 94, was arrested as a young liberation fighter on August 5, 1962, near the town of Howick, just months after he founded the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC).

The headless remains of infamous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly are to be returned to his descendants for a family burial 132 years after the notorious criminal was executed, officials said Thursday.

The Victorian state government said it had issued a new exhumation license for Kelly's remains, meaning a property developer behind the Pentridge Prison site where he was buried will be forced to hand over the skeleton.