A new study spotlights America's brutal legacy of racial violence, revealing that nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched in the south from 1877 to 1950, an average of more than one a week for 73 years.

The Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights group in Alabama that conducted the research, said present day racial discrimination and criminal justice problems are rooted in the country's violent past.

A centuries-old tomb in southern Egypt was partly demolished when a crane lifting blocks of sculpted masonry sliced through its dome, officials said on Tuesday.

Monday's accident happened when workmen were using the crane to move large blocks of stone to a site in the town of Aswan where an international exhibition for sculpture is being held.

On the day Nelson Mandela walked free 25 years ago, he went missing for more than an hour somewhere between the prison gates and the venue where he was to deliver his first speech.

Mandela's convoy had left Victor Verster Prison, but never made it to Cape Town City Hall -- where a huge crowd was waiting to welcome him.

Nepal should legalize same-sex marriage, a committee charged with implementing a Supreme Court order to improve the country's gay rights record has said.

The report, which the committee of legal and human rights experts submitted to the government this week, also includes recommendations on adoption by gay couples, one of its members told Agence France Presse.

Forty years after Cyprus was divided by a bloody conflict, the island's Greek and Turkish communities are trying to overcome their differences and find an unusual common cause: halloumi cheese.

Efforts to have the increasingly popular "squeaky" cheese granted a protected European Union status have raised fears that Turkish Cypriot producers will be excluded.

It is a delicate subject which has been taboo since biblical times but now an Israeli documentary has broken new ground by exploring the ultra-Orthodox Jewish ban on masturbation.

"Sacred Sperm" was born from the worries of a religiously observant father, Ori Gruder, who did not know how to talk to his 10-year-old son about the act of masturbation or sex in general. 

Germany's economy minister on Monday rejected calls by Greece's new prime minister for Berlin to pay reparations for World War II damages by the Nazis, insisting the issue was concluded 25 years ago.

"The likelihood is zero," Sigmar Gabriel, who is also Germany's vice-chancellor, said at a gathering of his Social Democrats in Brandenburg state near Berlin.

In sky-blue army uniforms emblazoned with red stars, they could be Communist comrades from China's civil war. But in fact the youngsters are the targets of a modern campaign for hearts and minds, with the classroom as its battleground.

"We are the new generation of little Red Army warriors," the children sang, tunics and belts matching the ones donned by Mao Zedong's troops when they marched across China. "We march onwards with incomparable firmness."

Two American sisters have been deported from Cambodia after they were convicted of taking naked photos inside the country's famed Angkor temple complex, officials said on Sunday.

Lindsey Adams, 22, and her 20-year-old sister Leslie were discovered taking nude shots of each other inside the Preah Khan temple at the world heritage site on Friday.

Novelist Assia Djebar, an ardent defender of women's rights in her native Algeria, has died aged 78, state radio said Saturday.

The French-language author and filmmaker, who was seen as a contender for the Nobel literature prize in recent years, died on Friday in a hospital in Paris.