Australian officials on Thursday condemned as "disgusting and sickening" the defacing of an Aboriginal burial site with Nazi swastikas and white supremacist slogans.

The Nazi symbol, "KKK" and "white power" were scrawled across the wall and several headstones were vandalised at the Fingal Head cemetery, a burial ground for Aboriginal people between 1864 and 1964 in the north of New South Wales state.

The European Union will fund the last phase of restoring the national library in Sarajevo which became a symbol of the destruction of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, officials said Wednesday.

The final part of the library's reconstruction, valued at 4.9 million euros ($6.4 million), should be finished by April 2014, Sarajevo mayor Alija Behmen said after signing the accord with EU special representative in Bosnia Peter Sorensen.

Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" has come out in Albania for the first time, printed by a local publisher who now risks possible charges for stirring racial hatred, officials said Wednesday.

Ermir Nika of the culture ministry said Hitler's book would be "judicially treated as it violates Albanian legislation" for inciting racial hatred.

A year after whole neighborhoods full of people were killed by the Japanese tsunami, rumors of ghosts swirl in Ishinomaki as the city struggles to come to terms with the awful tragedy.

One reconstruction project appears stalled because of fears the undead spirits of those who perished last March will bring bad luck.

Ancient Torahs and Bibles have gone on show in the Vatican in an "inter-religious exhibition" aimed at exploring the common heritage of two of the world's main monotheistic religions.

The show "Verbum Domini" ("The Word of God") in St. Peter's Square puts on display for the first time outside the United States the contents of the Green Collection -- the world's biggest archive of ancient biblical texts.

A rich Australian state's plan to pay up to Aus$2,000 (US$2,106) to Aboriginal people whose wages were kept from them for decades has been criticized as a "cruel and heartless offer".

Western Australia, a vast and resource-rich state riding a lucrative mining boom, has announced the payments for the "stolen wages" of Aboriginal people born before 1958 whose wages were controlled by the state government.

Vandals scrawled anti-Arab and anti-Christian slogans in Hebrew on a monastery compound and a school in Jerusalem overnight, Israeli police said on Tuesday.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said unknown people sprayed graffiti reading "death to Christians" and "price tag" on the walls of the compound of the Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Cross in west Jerusalem overnight.

Octogenarian Jewish writer Akos Kertesz of Hungary is seeking asylum in Canada because of a "political campaign" against him, sources close to him in this country confirmed Monday.

Kertesz, 80, winner of the Hungary's most prestigious literary prize the Kossuth, arrived with his wife in Montreal last Wednesday. Since then, he has curbed his availability to media so as not to influence his refugee bid, the source also said.

They were on the front line during last year's Arab uprisings, but women now fear for their rights as Islamists reap the fruits of revolt, winning elections in Egypt and Tunisia and gaining influence in Libya.

In Tunisia, the dominant Islamist Ennahda party has said it wants to fortify the personal status code, which bans polygamy and grants Tunisian women unparalleled rights in the region, by making it a basic law.

In her Mumbai shack, Manju Waghekar wonders if she will regret revealing the grim secrets of corruption, alcoholism and death among her friends and family for a searing new book on life in an Indian slum.

Manju, 23, is a central figure in "Behind the Beautiful Forevers", a true story that reviewers have hailed as an instant classic and a ground-breaking account of modern poverty.