What brings more fame than accepting the Nobel Prize? Not accepting it -- as Jean-Paul Sartre showed with a celebrated "non" to the world's most prestigious award exactly 50 years ago.

When the Swedish Academy made the announcement on October 22, 1964 that the French philosopher had won the prize for literature, he was lunching at a restaurant near the Parisian home of fellow intellectual heavyweight Simone de Beauvoir.

Every year ahead of the Muslim feast of sacrifice, a showroom in Indonesia swaps cars for hulking cows costing up to $25,000 each, seeking to lure a wealthy elite increasingly keen on ploughing money into celebrating their religion.

Some of the world's top authors will thrash out hot political issues at the world's biggest international book fair opening in Germany Tuesday.

For decades, whiskeys have been the status beverage of choice in Venezuela: an expensive, imported taste acquired during the country's oil boom.

But with the economy now in a bust, Venezuelans are increasingly returning to long-snubbed local rum to drown their sorrows.

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Hundreds of thousands of Muslim pilgrims began a mass movement out of the holy city of Mecca towards the nearby Mina Valley in Saudi Arabia on Thursday, beginning the hajj.

One of the world's largest annual gatherings and a pillar of the Islamic faith, this year's hajj comes with authorities striving to protect pilgrims from two deadly viruses, Ebola and the MERS coronavirus.

Visitors who wear face veils to Australia's Parliament House have been restricted to sound-proof enclosed galleries usually reserved for noisy school groups under a new counterterrorism security measure.

Some senators accused the Parliament of sending a message to the nation that Muslim women can be treated as second-class citizens.

Four flower vases adorn the living room of Hossam al-Dabbus's home. Initially inconspicuous, a closer look reveals they are made of Israeli tank shells collected by war-scarred Gazans.

The refugee camp dweller has picked through the rubble of the coastal strip to turn the remains of a conflict that killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians and more than 70 Israelis, into objects of art.

Skyscrapers are shooting up all over London, transforming a skyline once dominated by Big Ben and St Paul's Cathedral.

Some Londoners are delighted at their city's "Manhattanisation" but others warn it risks losing its soul.

Japan's "shinkansen" train, which led the world in super-fast rail transport technology, celebrated its 50th birthday Wednesday with ceremonies hailing its contribution to the country's post-war economy and its safety record.

A sleek, airplane-shaped N700A train left Platform 19 of Tokyo's central station at 6:00 am, exactly 50 years since the launch of the service along the Pacific industrial belt between the capital and the western megacity of Osaka.