Some South African Catholics say they hope a new pope will reform their church to allow them to help prevent the spread of AIDS, deal with pregnancies resulting from rape, and think about allowing priests to marry.

Congregants at a progressive parish in downtown Johannesburg say a new pope should balance tradition with the needs of a flock negotiating a modern world dangerous with sexual abuse, AIDS, poverty and contempt of women.

Austria solemnly marked Tuesday 75 years since German troops crossed the border unopposed on the early hours of March 12, 1938 and "annexed" Hitler's native country into the Third Reich.

"Already on the evening of March 11 swastika flags were fluttering over Vienna and other cities, including at police headquarters in Vienna ... even though not a single German soldier had yet set foot on Austrian soil," President Heinz Fischer said at a ceremony in the capital.

A decade after the US-led invasion of Iraq, years of violence and disdain for the country's current political class fuel nostalgia for Saddam Hussein -- the man the foreign troops fought to oust.

Though accusations of ties to Saddam and his regime are used to tar politicians in Baghdad, residents of his hometown, Tikrit, express fondness for a man who, though responsible for ordering the deaths of countless Iraqis, is remembered for having imposed stability, which has long been missing.

Macedonia on Monday marked the 70th anniversary of the deportation of nearly its entire Jewish community to a Nazi death camp during World War II, while a U.S.-based diaspora group called on neighbor Bulgaria to apologize for its role in the Holocaust.

Culture Minister Elizabeta Milevska led the memorial to honor the 7,144 people who were deported. Only about 50 of them survived.

British researchers on Saturday unveiled a new theory for the origins of Stonehenge, saying the ancient stone circle was originally a graveyard and venue for mass celebrations.

The findings would overturn the long-held belief that Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in southwestern England was created as a Stone Age astronomical calendar or observatory.

A vibrant city of poets, artists and thinkers in the early 1900s, it went down in a sea of swastikas after Hitler's triumphant return: Vienna after the Anschluss lost not only many of its people, but a great deal of its talent.

On March 12, 1938, Nazi troops marched into Austria. Three days later, Austrian-born Adolf Hitler gave a rousing speech from the balcony of Vienna's Imperial Palace to a jubilant crowd of 250,000 and Austria ceased to exist as an independent state.

A filthy oil painting locked away in a museum in the northeast of England was on Saturday revealed to be an original masterpiece by Van Dyck.

The portrait was spotted when it was photographed for an ambitious project to catalogue every single one of Britain's oil paintings in public ownership in an online museum.

Anyone who wants a beer in Haddonfield, New Jersey had better be ready for a drive: buying or selling alcohol anywhere within city limits is punishable with jail time.

Since long before Prohibition -- the 13-year national ban on alcohol that started in 1920 -- Haddonfield has been a "dry town." And the borough, just a stone's throw away from the big city of Philadelphia, has kept the laws on the books ever since.

Willy Wonka's golden ticket and Batman's mask are among some 30 movie costumes and props given Friday to the National Museum of American History in the U.S. capital.

U.S. production company Warner Bros. donated the items, which come from 13 feature films that came out between 1942 and 2005.

The 17-year-old beaten to death for refusing to marry a man old enough to be her grandfather. The teen dragged by her family to be raped to force her into marrying an elderly man. They are among 39,000 girls forced into marriage every day around the world, sold like cattle to enrich their families.

More than one-third of all girls are married in 42 countries, according to the U.N. Population Fund, referring to females under the age of 18. The highest number of cases occurs in some of the poorest countries, the agency figures show, with the West African nation of Niger at the bottom of the list with 75 percent of girls married before they turn 18. In Bangladesh the figure is 66 percent and in Central African Republic and Chad it is 68 percent.