The singing rises through the early-morning cool which still covers the esplanade in front of the Western Wall, the holiest site at which Jews can pray.

A mother and daughter pray entwined. A young woman clutches a tiny infant of just a few months to her chest. Another almost disappears under a prayer shawl embroidered with red flowers as if to protect herself from the invective of the ultra-Orthodox worshippers on the other side of the police barrier separating them from the section of the plaza reserved for women.

More than two million Tibetans in China have been forced to change homes or relocate in a government-sponsored program that is damaging their traditional culture and rural lifestyle, a human rights monitoring group said.

"The scale and speed at which the Tibetan rural population is being remodeled by mass rehousing and relocation policies are unprecedented in the post-Mao era," Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, said in a release accompanying the report.

A long-awaited international treaty that would give hundreds of millions of blind and visually impaired people better access to books is to be signed Thursday, according to the organizers of a conference in Morocco.

Hundreds of delegates from the World Intellectual Property Organization's 186 member countries gathered in the central city of Marrakesh to finalize the treaty seeking to overcome the restrictions to published material that copyright laws impose on the blind.

At the Itsali primary school, on a dusty road near Brazzaville's airport, all but one of the 20 teachers are women, a sign of the major gender shift in the Republic of Congo's educational system over the past two decades.

The small school employs almost exclusively women, from its directors and teachers to administrators and secretaries.

Locals in Niger's historic city of Agadez are optimistic that its inclusion on UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites will bring tourists back after years of unrest in the area drove visitors away from its famed mudbrick buildings.

"The news has swept across the city like sand in the desert. It's incredible, thank you UNESCO!" Hadil, an Internet cafe manager in Agadez, told Agence France Presse over the telephone from Niger's capital Niamey.

A new exhibition focused on Belgian painter Rene Magritte's embrace of surrealism will visit museums in Chicago, Houston and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, organizers said Tuesday.

"Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938" groups some 80 paintings, collages, photographs and objects, and will be at the MoMA from September 28 through January 12 before moving on to the Menil Collection in Houston and the Art Institute of Chicago.

As a child, Pablo Picasso's granddaughter Marina often found herself shut out of his sumptuous Cannes villa "La Californie". Four decades after his death, the gates of the house she inherited, along with thousands of his art works, are always promptly opened to visitors.

"Living in this house, unconsciously perhaps it's a way of recapturing lost time in a place where we were once excluded," says Marina, who for many years struggled to accept "an inheritance given without love".

Asian immigrants tend to live in highly segregated enclaves in the United States and their income level is often higher than that of white Americans, said a U.S. study out Wednesday.

The nearly 18 million Asian immigrants to the United States are the country's fastest growing minority group, more than doubling since 1990, said the research by Brown University.

U.S. authorities blocked the sale of a Pablo Picasso painting following a request from Italy after the $11.5 million work of art's owners were charged with embezzlement and fraud, the U.S. government said said Tuesday.

The U.S. Justice Department said it had "restrained" the 1909 masterpiece "Compotier et tasse", which had been offered for private sale in New York, amid a probe into its owners, Gabriella Amati and her late husband Angelo Maj.

Brazilian literature and arts will this year come under the spotlight at the world's biggest book fair, which annually attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors in the western German city of Frankfurt, organizers said Tuesday.

After New Zealand was last year's guest of honor, Brazil takes center stage at the 2013 Frankfurt book fair, with 70 of its authors as well as artists and others expected to showcase the country's literary and cultural traditions.