As vespers drew to a close at the St. Egidio Catholic community center, a dozen homeless men in threadbare pants and rumpled T-shirts shuffled into a side room where volunteers handed out cups of soda and soft yellow rolls spread with mayonnaise.

"This is like my home," said Ernesto Gutierrez, a 66-year-old retired policeman who sleeps in parks and other public places because he has no relatives overseas helping to supplement his meager pension. Often the sandwich he gets at St. Egidio is his only meal of the day: "I appreciate it so much."

Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier was charged Monday by a Paris court with stealing paintings by Pablo Picasso, a charge he categorically denied.

The 52-year-old, under investigation for repeated theft, must hand over 27 million euros ($31 million) in caution money -- the sum said to have been paid by Russian billionaire Dmitri Rybolovlev for two Picasso masterpieces, including "Woman with Fan", and 58 drawings.

The first ever exhibition of avant-garde artist Christo in his native Bulgaria opened in Sofia on Monday, giving a rare insight into his spectacular wrapping projects.

Christo, 80, has not returned to Bulgaria since emigrating during communism in 1958 and settling in New York in 1964 with his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude, who passed away in 2009.

South African school teacher Benedict Daswa, who was bludgeoned to death for resisting witchcraft, was beatified on Sunday, becoming the first person from the southern African region to undergo the key step toward sainthood.

He was proclaimed "blessed" in an apostolic letter read on behalf of Pope Francis by Italian Cardinal Angelo Amato to some 30,000 people during mass in Tshitanini village, not far from Daswa's house in South Africa's northern Limpopo province.

The deadly collapse of a construction crane in Saudi Arabia's holy city of Mecca has highlighted the controversial pace of high-end urban development in the birthplace of Islam.

More than 100 people died on Friday when the crane toppled into a courtyard of the Grand Mosque, one of Islam's holiest sites, during a thunderstorm.

A British-funded memorial to the thousands killed, tortured and jailed in the Mau Mau rebellion was unveiled in Kenya on Saturday, in a rare example of former rulers commemorating a colonial uprising.

At least 10,000 people died in one of the British Empire's bloodiest insurgencies -- some historians say over double that -- and the security operation to tackle the 1952-1960 struggle was marked by horrific abuses.

Popular Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's new book has gone on sale, with a major domestic bookstore chain buying 90 percent of the initial print run in a direct challenge to online rivals.

Murakami's autobiographical essay, which translates into English as "Novelist by Profession", appeared in bookstore shelves on Thursday. 

A quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lenin made a comeback of sorts Thursday as authorities unearthed a granite head of the Russian revolutionary to truck it across the German capital.

The 3.5 tonne piece, long buried and half forgotten in a forest on the edge of the city, will become an eye-catching highlight of a new museum exhibit of key figures that played a role in Germany's turbulent history.

New York's Museum of Modern Art is devoting an entire floor to the sculptures of Pablo Picasso in the first major U.S. museum survey of his three-dimensional work in nearly 50 years.

From his earliest piece, a tiny terra cotta of a seated woman created in 1902, to a head of a woman made in 1964, "Picasso Sculpture" features more than 140 works on loan from private and public collections that showcase the scope, range and variety of his sculptures. They include his bronze "She-Goat" from 1950 and sheet metal and wire "Guitar" from 1914 from MoMA's own collection.

On the edge of a slum in India's capital, past rubbish and an open sewer, a dozen children are diligently drawing everything from Mahatma Gandhi to popular cartoon character Chota Bheem.

Watching over them is Rangamma Kaul, a 51-year-old teacher determined to bring art to the ramshackle colony in New Delhi's west whose families scratch a living labouring on construction sites and selling street food.