Argentina's iconic first lady Evita Peron was so loved or hated when she was alive that long after her death, passionate arguments about her character drowned out more serious efforts to examine her legacy.

Some historians say that only now, 60 years after Gen. Juan Domingo Peron's firebrand wife succumbed to cancer at the age of 33, are many beginning to consider how much her actions shaped the society they live in today.

As the curtain comes down on the most divisive and talked-about film in Nepali cinema history, half the audience stands to applaud while the rest slump bemused in their seats.

The split reaction has been common among packed theatres watching "Highway", a sweeping social commentary hailed by many as a new benchmark for the domestic film industry but dismissed by others as complicated and boring.

French archaeologists have discovered a roughly 5,000-year-old pharaonic solar boat in an expedition in Abu Rawash, west of the Egyptian capital, the antiquities ministry said on Wednesday.

The antiquities minister, Mohammed Ibrahim, said the boat was up to 5,000 years old. "It goes back to the era of Pharaoh Den, one of the First Dynasty kings," he said in a statement.

A satellite channel run and hosted by fully-veiled presenters aims to break down the barriers for women in niqab who until the revolution that brought Islamists to power were shunned by Egypt's lucrative television industry.

In the studios of Maria TV in Cairo, which were launched on the first day of Ramadan last week, two presenters dressed in stark black, their faces covered but for narrow eye slits and their hands gloved, discuss the editorial content for the day.

In restive northwest Syria, the uprising has found an unlikely new partner in the struggle against the regime of President Bashar Assad: foreign Islamists who are joining the fight.

But rather than adopt the revolt's calls for democracy and the fall of a dictatorial regime, such jihadists believe the minority Alawite sect -- an offshoot of Shiite Islam to which Assad's family belongs -- are "apostates" and need to be fought and overthrown.

"The United States of America" has become entrenched as one of the most frequently printed phrases in the modern era of written English, a study of 500 years of language evolution has shown.

Among the top dozen phrases most-printed in books every year, this one stands out from the other most popular five-word sentence components like "at the end of the", "as a result of the" or "on the part of the".

Xu, a pretty woman in her 30s, warily walked into a Beijing singles club in a bid to shed her status as one of China's "Unwanted".

Xu had not been to the "Garden of Joy" for more than a year but, with time and societal judgment weighing heavily on her, she returned with cautious hopes.

Fervent Catholics in a crime-ridden New Jersey town are flocking to what they say is the miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary's image in a tree trunk.

On Tuesday, a crowd of several dozen people stood around the tree, praying, taking photos and swapping stories of what they call a miracle.

Renowned Syrian sculptor Wael Qastoun has been tortured to death in the flashpoint central of city of Homs, an artists' association said on Tuesday.

A statement released by the Syrian Coalition of Artists for Freedom said Qastoun "died under torture."

Fresh air, fine wine and world-class performers are pulling the crowds to Bordeaux's wine country for an ever-rising number of summer jazz and classical concerts in the French region.

"It's a trend, and it works. It attracts people who are not the usual jazz music audience," the pianist Francois Faure said as he stepped off stage at the Saint Emilion Jazz festival this week.