During the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Muslims are called on to reflect on their faith as they conduct their daily fast. This past month, some clerics and scholars reflected on ways to reform the religious discourse in Islam to keep up with modern-day challenges and oppose extremism.

A popular Egyptian religious figure used his daily TV show to talk about ways to renew interpretation of Islam's holy book, the Quran. The United Arab Emirates hosted a series of Ramadan mosque lectures by dozens of clerics, including many from al-Azhar, Egypt's premier Sunni Muslim center of thought and learning, and a popular American sheikh, who warned that renovation is needed in Islam after centuries of neglect in thought left the Muslim world in disrepair.

The spiritual leader of a Chinese Buddhist sect is to be prosecuted for financial and sexual offences, state media said Thursday, as Beijing intensifies its crackdown on what it calls dangerous cults.

Wu Zeheng, the leader of the Huazang Dharma group, will face a number of charges, including rape and using a cult "to sabotage law enforcement", the official Xinhua news agency said.

Iraq's antiquities minister says the Baghdad National Museum has gotten back nearly 500 artifacts recovered by U.S. Army commandos during a recent raid in Syria targeting the Islamic State group.

Minister Adel Fahad Sharshab pledged that authorities will recover all missing artifacts. He spoke Wednesday as the recovered pieces were on display.

A Samsung company on Wednesday removed online cartoons attacking a U.S. hedge fund's founder as a ravenous, big-beaked vulture after Jewish organizations protested similar smears in South Korea's media.

The hedge fund, Elliott, is opposing a takeover deal between two Samsung companies that critics say will ensure the current generation of Samsung's founding family retains control over South Korea's biggest conglomerate.

Grave robbers have stolen from a crypt the head of German expressionist cinema great Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, director of the silent-film vampire classic "Nosferatu", reports said Wednesday.

Police did not rule out an occultist motive after finding candle wax in the family crypt in Stahnsdorf southwest of Berlin and were investigating the case on charges of theft and disturbing the peace of the dead.

South Korea has decided to return one of two ancient Buddha statutes that were stolen by Korean thieves in Japan three years ago, the prosecutor general's office said Wednesday.

Although Japan had demanded the return of both Korean-made statues, the prosecutor said the second likeness would remain in South Korea pending the resolution of a dispute over its original ownership.

A former SS officer known as the Bookkeeper of Auschwitz said he was "very sorry" for his time stationed at the death camp, ahead of a verdict expected Wednesday in his trial.

"No-one should have taken part in Auschwitz," Oskar Groening, 94, told a court in the northern city of Lueneburg Tuesday.

Slovenian retro-avantgarde rock group Laibach has announced it will become the first foreign rock outfit to perform in North Korea this August as part of their Liberation Day Tour.

Founded in 1980 in former Yugoslavia, Slovenia's best-known music export frequently courts controversy with its deliberately ambiguous use of political and nationalist imagery.

Bookstores opened at midnight when copies of Harper Lee's eagerly awaited, but controversial second novel flew off the shelves more than half a century after the groundbreaking success of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

The global release of "Go Set a Watchman" has been feted as one of the biggest literary events in years. 

A Russian atheist social networking page was blocked Monday on the back of a court ruling that it insulted the feelings of religious believers.

The group called "There is no God" on the VKontakte networking site -- which had over 26,000 followers -- went offline for users across the whole country.