Millions of Indians on Wednesday celebrated the Holi festival, dancing to the beat of drums, smearing each other with green, yellow and red colors and exchanging sweets in homes, parks and streets.

Free from wearing masks and other COVID-19 restrictions after two years, they drenched each other with colored water.

A blacksmith in the Russian-controlled eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk is practically beating swords into ploughshares, and turning one man's trash into treasures. Viktor Mikhalev takes weapons and ammunition and produces what he calls the flowers of war.

Mikhalev, who trained as a welder, lives and works in a house whose fence and door are decorated with forged flowers and grapes. In his workshop are piles of half-burnt machine guns and shells from the war's front line. Friends and acquaintances bring them as raw material for his art.

Hundreds of thousands of people are set to take part in demonstrations, rallies, and colorful events around the globe on Wednesday to mark International Women's Day, the date established to celebrate women and demand equality for half the planet´s population.

While there have been major advances in dozens of countries, the situation in places such as Afghanistan and Iran and the constant crimes and violations in nearly every nation in the world are a cold reminder that there is still a long road ahead.

Women and girls will be at the heart of the UK's international work as the British Foreign Secretary launches a new strategy to tackle gender inequality around the world, a statement said.

The British Embassy Beirut launched the Ambassador for a Day Lebanon competition in January this year. The competition was open to 15-18 year old girls across Lebanon and over 500 girls submitted entries on the International Women’s Day 2023 theme “Embrace Equity”. The creativity, passion and potential in their applications was inspiring.

Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the country has become the most repressive in the world for women and girls, deprived of many of their basic rights, the United Nations said Wednesday.

In a statement released on the International Women's Day, the U.N. mission said that Afghanistan's new rulers have shown an almost "singular focus on imposing rules that leave most women and girls effectively trapped in their homes."

On the eve of International Women's Day, leading women's rights campaigners at the United Nations and the African Union and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate criticized male-dominated governments Tuesday for excluding women from peace negotiations.

They complained that governments are ignoring a U.N. resolution adopted in 2000 demanding equal participation for women in talks to end conflicts.

The Vatican and Greece were finalizing a deal Tuesday for the return of three sculpture fragments from the Parthenon that have been in the collection of the Vatican Museums for two centuries, the latest case of a Western museum bowing to demands for restitution.

The Vatican has termed the return an ecumenical "donation" to the Orthodox Christian archbishop of Athens and all Greece, not necessarily a state-to-state transfer. But it nevertheless puts pressure on the British Museum to conclude a deal with Greece over the fate of its much bigger collection of Parthenon sculptures.

The reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris is going fast enough to allow its reopening to visitors and faithful at the end of 2024, less than six years after a fire ravaged its roof, French officials said.

The cathedral's iconic spire, which collapsed in the blaze, will gradually start reappearing above the monument this year in a powerful signal of its revival, the army general in charge of the colossal project, Gen. Jean-Louis Georgelin, said.

Archaeologists unearthed a Sphinx-like statue and the remains of a shrine in an ancient temple in southern Egypt, antiquities authorities said Monday.

The artifacts were found in the temple of Dendera in Qena Province, 280 miles (450 kilometers) south of the capital of Cairo, the Antiquities Ministry said in a statement.