Founded to care for victims of war, the International Committee of the Red Cross has faced a tough task, sometimes been found wanting, but has always known how to adapt to shifting challenges.

The Swiss-based ICRC marks its 150th anniversary on February 17, making it the world's oldest humanitarian organisation still in existence.

As Indonesia and other countries with Chinese diasporas welcome the Year of the Snake, some Islamic leaders have ignited a religious row by declaring the celebrations "haram" and off limits for Muslims.

After decades of repression under the dictatorship of Suharto, who rose to power after a bloody purge of communists and Chinese in the late 1960s, Chinese-Indonesians are now accepted in mainstream society of the largely Muslim nation.

"Not a day goes by without tombs being vandalized," says Dalmasso Bruno, caretaker of the Italian cemetery in the Libyan capital where Christians fear rising Muslim extremism.

"Human bones have been taken out of their tomb and scattered across the cemetery" in central Tripoli, he said. "The Libyan authorities came and took pictures. They promised to take measures but nothing has been done."

Tens of millions of Hindu pilgrims prepared to cleanse their sins with a plunge into the sacred river Ganges, ahead of the most auspicious day of the world's largest religious festival.

Some 30 million Hindu saints, devotees and visitors were expected to take part in the Kumbh Mela on Sunday -- considered the holiest of the 55-day festival -- in north India, police said.

Teenagers in blue-and-white uniforms pour out of classrooms of this boarding school at the edge of Haiti's capital, chattering in their native language of Creole about the science test they have just taken.

"Eske ou te byen konpoze?" asks one boy in the campus courtyard. In English, it translates as "How do you think you did?"

The leader of a breakaway Amish group who ordered his followers to chop off his rivals' beards was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Friday after being convicted of hate crimes.

Fifteen others convicted in the attacks, including three of ringleader Samuel Mullet's brothers and six women, were given lesser sentences of between one and seven years in prison.

When a middle-aged South African engineer recently set out to write a novel in his native Zulu, he found himself hamstrung by a lack of words to describe modern life.

Determined not to use English as a crutch, Phiwayinkosi Mbuyazi instead created 450 new words in Zulu, the mother tongue of a quarter of South Africa's 50 million population.

A Chilean judge has ordered the remains of famed poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda exhumed as part of an investigation into his death, the foundation that manages his literary legacy said Friday.

The leftist poet, who died 12 days after the 1973 military coup that ousted socialist President Salvador Allende and brought Augusto Pinochet to power, was long believed to have died of cancer.

The U.N. cultural organization UNESCO is assessing the damage wreaked on Mali's historic city of Timbuktu and repairing the mausoleums of saints alone will cost up to five million euros, its chief said Friday.

Known as "the City of 333 Saints" or "The Pearl of the Desert", Timbuktu was listed as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1988 and is an ancient center of Islamic learning.

Women clergy will be allowed to attend meetings of the bishops who lead the Church of England for the first time in response to the vote to block women from becoming bishops, it was announced on Friday.

At least eight senior women clergy will attend and speak at meetings of the House of Bishops, although they will not be allowed to vote.