Nearly 2,000 people gathered in Beirut Saturday to form a giant letter "U" -- standing for unity -- as the country struggles to contain the fallout from neighbor Syria's civil war.

Organised by the Beirut Celebration non-governmental organisation, the event marked Lebanon's 71st Independence Day anniversary.

Thousands of Catholic pilgrims descended on the Indian coastal state of Goa on Saturday to witness the once-a-decade exposition of the relics of a 16th century Spanish missionary.

Devotees from around the world formed a queue of more than one kilometre long to venerate the relics of St Francis Xavier, which are on display until January 4 in the former Portuguese colony.

In the run-up to Thanksgiving, a holiday to celebrate bountiful harvests, Americans are being urged to stop wasting food so much.

Some 34 million pounds (15.4 million kilograms) of food is thrown away in the United States every year, the  Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said Friday.

A magnificent blue diamond has fetched $32.6 million in New York, breaking the world auction record for any diamond of its color, auction house Sotheby's announced.

The stunning 9.75 carat, pear-shaped diamond was bought by a Hong Kong private collector after 20 minutes of competitive bidding on Thursday evening, Sotheby's said.

A relative of late German art collector Cornelius Gurlitt lodged a claim Friday for his inheritance, a Nazi-era art hoard which he has bequested to a Swiss museum, a spokesman said.

The surprise move came just days before the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern is expected to reveal whether it accepts the inheritance of the spectacular trove of more than 1,000 pieces amassed during the Nazi era.

A 100-year-old watercolor of Munich's old city hall is expected to fetch at least 50,000 euros ($60,000) at auction this weekend, not so much for its artistic value as for the signature in the bottom left corner: A. Hitler.

Nuremberg's Weidler auction house says the painting is one some 2,000 painted by Adolf Hitler and is thought to be from about 1914, when he was struggling to make a living as an artist, almost two decades before rising to power as the Nazi dictator.

Sotheby's announced Thursday that CEO William Ruprecht is to step down, a week after lackluster contemporary art sales and a year after a bruising battle with billionaire activist Daniel Loeb.

Ruprecht, 58, will stand aside by mutual agreement with the board of directors but will stay as chairman, president and CEO until his successor is in place to ensure a smooth transition, it said.

Researchers said Thursday that people likely moved to the Tibetan highlands 3,600 years ago, in an indication of when humans first settled at high altitudes.

Humans were able to permanently settle as high as 3,400 meters (11,000 feet) on the Tibetan plateau -- which is known as "the roof of the world" -- by growing altitude-resistant crops and raising livestock, according to a study published in the U.S. journal Science.

It is an image famous in a thousand postcards: giraffe, rhino and zebra pacing the savannah with city skyscrapers towering in the background.

But flanked by one of the continents fastest growing cities, Kenya's capital Nairobi, east Africa's oldest national park is under threat.

Phil Klay's "Redeployment," a debut collection of searching, satiric and often agonized stories by an Iraq war veteran, has won the National Book Award for fiction.

Klay was chosen Wednesday night over such high-profile finalists as Marilynne Robinson's "Lila" and Emily St. John Mandel's "Station Eleven." His book was the first debut release to win in fiction since Julia Glass' "The Three Junes" in 2002, the first story collection to win since Andrea Barrett's "Ship Fever" in 1996 and the first fiction win for an Iraq veteran.