Brigitte Bardot's funeral was being held on Wednesday with a private service and a public homage in Saint-Tropez, the French Riviera resort where she lived for more than half a century after retiring from movie stardom at the height of her fame.

The animal rights activist and far-right supporter died Dec. 28 at age 91 at her home in southern France.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged calm after a bus driver ran over and killed a teenage boy Tuesday night during a protest in Jerusalem against a law seeking to draft the ultra-Orthodox community into Israel's military.

"I call for restraint to prevent the mood from becoming further inflamed so that, heaven forbid, we do not have additional tragedies," Netanyahu said in a statement early Wednesday, adding that the death would be thoroughly investigated.

A council fighting against Yemen's Houthi rebels said Wednesday that it had expelled the leader of a separatist movement and charged him with treason after he reportedly declined to travel to Saudi Arabia for talks.

The latest upheaval in southern Yemen is revealing a growing divide among the Persian Gulf powers, cracking the coalition fighting the Iran-aligned Houthis. Longstanding differences between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — from Sudan to energy policy — have spilled into Yemen, where they back rival factions. The rift has deepened strains between the two neighbors, who officially share the goal of countering the Houthis, in control of the capital, Sanaa, since 2014.

The deadliest clashes so far broke out Tuesday between Syrian government forces and Kurdish fighters in a contested area of the northern city of Aleppo, as efforts to merge the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces with the national army have shown little progress.

Syria 's state-run SANA news agency said a soldier was killed and three others were wounded in an attack by the SDF. State TV later reported that three civilians, including two women, were killed and others were wounded, including two children, in shelling of a residential area that it blamed on the SDF. SANA also said nine Aleppo Directorate of Agriculture employees were wounded by SDF shelling that hit its office.

Iran faces a new round of protests challenging the country's theocracy, but it seems like the only thing people there want to talk about is half a world away: Venezuela.

Since the U.S. military seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a longtime ally of Tehran, over the weekend, Iranian state media headlines and officials have condemned the operation. In the streets and even in some official conversations, however, there's a growing question over whether a similar mission could target the Islamic Republic's top officials including the supreme leader, 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

By Kamran Talattof, University of Arizona

A familiar slogan has echoed through the streets of various Iranian cities in recent days: "Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran."

The ceasefire monitoring committee, which includes representatives from the United States, France, Lebanon, Israel and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), met Wednesday in Naqoura in south Lebanon.

The meeting was only military and was not attended by civilian representatives. Last month, Lebanon and Israel appointed the first civilians to lead their delegations to the ceasefire monitoring committee, after a request from the United States.

Israel's air force struck areas in southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday and early Tuesday, including in the country's third-largest city.

A strike around 1 a.m. Tuesday leveled a three-story commercial building in the southern coastal city of Sidon, a few days before Lebanon's army commander is scheduled to brief the government on its mission of disarming Hezbollah in areas along the border with Israel.

Leonardo DiCaprio emphasized the importance of creating cinema over content at the Palm Springs Film Festival Friday night.

"Movies are still meant to be experienced, together, in a theatre. Right now, that belief matters more than ever. Original films are harder to make and harder to protect. But movies still matter, not content, but cinema. Stories made by people meant to be shared in a dark room in a communal experience," he said.

Each January, an odd and beautiful thing happens in the frigid northeastern Chinese city of Harbin.

Some would argue that the place, the capital of Heilongjiang province, has enough ice already. But sculptors converge on the town not far from China's border with Russia to bring out more of it, and to compete for the best ice sculpture of the year.