Devout Hindus may soon receive water from the River Ganges by post, a minister said Monday, as India moves to tap booming e-commerce platforms.

Many Hindus believe the water from the River Ganges has the power to wash away their sins and religious ceremonies are considered incomplete without a generous sprinkling of the holy water.

Transgender people live under dramatically varying circumstances around the world -- often facing violent repression, but also conquering crucial new rights most notably in Europe and the United States.

There are few reliable statistics on the community, in part because many transgender people around the world are unable to come out. And there are sometimes misunderstandings of the complex and changing vocabulary involved.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Monday launched restoration work at Kabul's historic Darul Aman Palace, whose bombed out ruins have long symbolized the suffering caused by decades of conflict.

The once-grand hilltop palace at the edge of Kabul was also the venue of Ghani's cabinet meeting on Monday, the first such official gathering there in nearly a century.

Thai officials armed with a court order on Monday resumed the removal of tigers from a controversial temple which attracts tourists as a petting zoo, but stands accused of selling off the big cats for slaughter.

On Monday afternoon one tiger was tranquilized and carried away on a stretcher, while another was lured into a cage to be relocated from the Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua temple, according to an AFP photographer at the scene.

Germany recorded bigger numbers of people moving from western states to eastern ones for the first time since reunification in 2014, data published Monday showed.

Following reunification in 1990, around 200,000 east Germans flooded to the west each year in search of jobs and better opportunities.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday that family planning and contraception were not for Muslim families, in his latest comments promoting population growth that have angered women's activists.

France's Jewish community, the largest in Europe, chose a Sephardi Jew as its leader Sunday for the first time in half a century.

Clergymen should make themselves available to their flocks day and night instead of keeping visiting hours and relaxing once the church doors close, Pope Francis said Sunday.

A Chinese detergent maker has apologized for an advertisement which shows a black man stuffed into a washing machine and transformed into a fair-skinned Asian, just a day after dismissing critics as too sensitive.

Gripping a monkey-faced chess piece, Thein Zaw swipes his hand across the chequerboard and topples an advancing demon, demonstrating an ancient form of the game that Myanmar traditionalists are battling to revive.

Sittuyin, as Myanmar's unique chess is called, is similar to the modern game but has distinctive pieces as well as moves that echo a time when warriors used it to fine tune real fighting strategies.