Catholics in this Paraguayan town paid homage to St. Francis Solano on Friday in a peculiar religious festival that involves dressing up in bird-feather suits.

The celebration was held at the chapel that bears the name of the saint, who was born in Spain in 1549 and died in Peru 1610. Solano was canonized in 1726.

On the mean and traffic-choked streets of Mexico City, a fearless superhero is fighting to protect the planet from the worst the internal combustion engine can throw at it.

The mighty Peatonito (Little Pedestrian) pushes cars blocking the path of pedestrians, creates crosswalks with spray paint, and climbs on vehicles parked on sidewalks -- though his mother has begged him to stop stepping on them.

Around the corner from a bland gray street in the working class Tres de Febrero suburb of Buenos Aires, a blue boat starts to take form on a wall.

Street artist Andres Rotundo Fraga, wearing a green overall and armed with a brush and some acrylic paint, has started a three-day project aimed at reviving an apartment wall damaged by indecipherable graffiti.

Cameroon has extended a ban on full Islamic veils in parts of the country as it seeks to curb Boko Haram violence after a string of suicide bombings by female attackers.

The decision comes less than a month after two female suicide bombers wearing full veils blew themselves up on the border with Nigeria in the north, killing 11.

Spain raised the minimum age for marriage from 14 to 16 on Thursday, in a reform that brings the law in line with the new age of consent.

The minimum age for marriage in exceptional cases, which require the consent of a judge, has been raised from 14 to 16, though the general rule is still that people need to be 18 to marry.

An iron and steel colossus that sank on a summer's night 35 years ago off Cyprus is now considered one of the world's best shipwreck dives.

Thousands dive down each year to see the Zenobia -- the "Titanic of the Mediterranean" -- which is slumped on its port side at a depth of 40 metres (130 feet) off the island.

For years Karachi's walls have been spattered with the bloodstains of murder victims and scrawled with graffiti touting everything from sectarian hatred to quack cures for erectile dysfunction.

Now a group of artists and volunteers are reclaiming the walls by painting them with cheerful designs aimed at bringing some happiness and pride back to an often violent, chaotic and corrupt city.

Buried and long forgotten, the head of a giant Lenin statue is set to make a comeback in the German capital a quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Soviet leader will gaze again on the people when the 3.5 tonne piece is resurrected from its current grave -- a sandpit under a pile of rocks home to a colony of lizards.

More than 30 ancient gold ornaments went on show in a Chinese museum this week after Paris quietly insisted a billionaire collector and France's top antique dealer return them on the grounds they were stolen.

The move came 15 years after the two men donated the works to a Paris museum following an intervention by France's then President Jacques Chirac, an admirer of Asian art.

A Koran manuscript has been carbon dated to close to the time of the Prophet Mohammed, making it one of the oldest in the world, a British university said Wednesday.

The two leaves of parchment, filled with "surprisingly legible" text from Islam's holy book, have been dated to around the early seventh century, the University of Birmingham said.