Beijing was awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics, largely under the assumption that the Games would improve civil liberties in the country.

There is no such talk now. The 2022 Winter Olympics open Friday under heavy security and warnings from officials that athletes or others could face legal action if they speak out on human rights or other touchy issues.

At Hammam Bakri in Damascus' Old City, Syrian men wrapped in towels from the waist down lie down on a scalding marble floor. Masseurs vigorously scrub their skin with a soap-soaked loofah and wash them down with hot water.

Around a hexagonal fountain outside — traditionally found in old Damascene houses — patrons sip an infusion of herbs and dried flowers known as zhourat. The soothing smell fills the air around the domed roof.

The actress Whoopi Goldberg has apologized for saying the Holocaust was not about race, comments that caused a backlash.

She made the initial comments on ABC's ''The View"' program on Monday morning. Her apology came in a tweet hours later.

Chinese people rang in the Lunar New Year on Tuesday despite pandemic restrictions, as small crowds gathered at temples to offer traditional prayers for the Year of the Tiger.

At the Lama Temple in Beijing, dozens of people bowed in prayer before the ornate west gate of the Tibetan Buddhist site that was shut because of pandemic restrictions.

A Lebanese father tells his teenage daughter she is free to choose whether to have sex with her boyfriend despite his reservations.

An Egyptian wife discreetly slips off her black, lacy underwear from under her clothes before heading out for dinner, and it's not her husband she's trying to tantalize.

Tighter COVID-19 restrictions, including a ban on dining in restaurants after 6 p.m., mean many Hong Kong families are eating their reunion dinner on Lunar New Year's eve at home this year.

The traditional dish known as "poon choi," or "basin food," is a large dish filled with lotus root, radish, taro and more expensive delicacies such as prawns, abalones and meat layered on top. Each food is symbolic and enjoying the dish with family is a way of sharing hope for a good year.

Lebanon’s crisis is increasingly forcing young people to drop out of learning and engage in ill-paid, irregular and informal work "just to survive and help feed their families," UNICEF said in a report released Friday.

The report – Searching for Hope – says that more than 4 in 10 youth in Lebanon reduced spending on education to buy basic food, medicine and other essential items, and 3 in 10 stopped their education altogether.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Friday that Japan will recommend a former gold mine on Sado Island for a UNESCO World Heritage list, despite protests from South Korea that the site is inappropriate because of its wartime abuse of Korean laborers — a sensitive issue that still strains ties between the neighbors.

Kishida's decision to recommend the 400-year-old site in northern Japan this year apparently reverses his earlier, more cautious stance after a strong push by powerful ultra-rightwing revisionists in his governing party.

Human rights activists issued a call to action against the Beijing Olympics on Friday, imploring athletes and sponsors to speak out against what they call the "genocide games."

Speaking at an online press conference organized by the rights group Human Rights Watch, activists representing Chinese dissidents and the minority Uyghur and Tibetan populations urged international attendants to voice their opposition to China's hosting of the Games, which begin next week.

In a classroom in northern Iraq, Zhiwei Hu presides over his students as a conductor would an orchestra. He cues with a question, and the response from his students resounds in perfect, fluent Chinese.

The 52-year-old has been teaching the cohort of 14 Iraqi Kurdish students at the behest of the Chinese consulate in the northern city of Irbil.