Its elaborate Baroque facade now sparkles in the sun, scaffold-free: Rome's Trevi Fountain will gush its emerald waters once again Tuesday after a clean-up funded by Italian fashion house Fendi.

Crowds of frustrated tourists have spent months peeking at bits of the monument from a special walkway put in over the fountain while repairs were carried out to the tune of over 2.0 million euros ($2.2 million).

As children elsewhere celebrate Halloween in fancy costume dress, for the Misak people of southeastern Colombia the coming of November is a solemn occasion to honor the dead.

Of the scores of indigenous groups in Colombia, the Misak are considered to have best conserved their ancestral traditions, which at the coming of winter means making offerings to their ancestors.

Writer Mathias Enard won France's top literary prize Tuesday in a race dominated by books about West's love-hate relationship with Islam and the Arab world.

A scholar of both Arabic and Persian, Barcelona-based Enard, 43, wove a poetic eulogy to the long history of cultural exchanges between East and West in "Boussole" ("Compass"), and had been the critics' favorite for the award.

Prosecutors deliberately kept African Americans off the all-white jury that sent a black man to death row, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Monday, in a case alleging widespread racial bias in the nation's judicial system.

Timothy Foster, who has spent nearly 30 years on Georgia's death row, was convicted of the 1986 murder of an elderly white woman, Queen Madge White.

Israel's far-right Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel has infuriated animal lovers by suggesting that the country's millions of stray cats and dogs be deported rather than castrated.

Ariel wrote to Environment Minister Avi Gabai proposing that the budget allocated to castration be used "to deport them to a foreign country", Yediot Aharonot newspaper reported Monday.

Michelle Obama arrived Monday in Qatar on the opening stage of her first solo Middle East tour, where she is expected to call for addressing "cultural beliefs" obstructing girls' education. 

The U.S. first lady is set to speak at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) on Wednesday, as part of her well-publicized efforts to promote girls' education globally.

Northern Ireland's assembly on Monday voted in favor of same-sex marriage for the first time -- by just one vote -- but the ruling Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) sank the motion with a constitutional veto.

The power-sharing assembly had voted narrowly against the legalization on four previous occasions, but the tables turned ever so slightly with Monday's vote, when it prevailed by 53 votes to 52.

The veteran Franco-Tunisian author Hedi Kaddour is the favorite to win France's top literary award, the Goncourt, when it is announced on Tuesday, but the gong often throws up a surprise.

The novel by 70-year-old Kaddour, "Les preponderants" (which roughly translates as "The principals"), about colonial society deeply rooted in its ways in 1920s north Africa, figures on a host of award lists and has already been the co-winner of the prestigious Academie francaise prize this year.

The cry of roosters drowns out the roar of engines beneath a Bangkok flyover as all eyes are trained on two sparring birds, a bloody, high stakes battle in a country where cockfighting is big business.

The birds do not usually fight to the death, as in many parts of the world, but they can still inflict fatal damage to their opponents in contests almost always accompanied by lucrative gambling.

Two famous paintings thought to be works of medieval Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch are likely to have been imitations painted around the same time, Dutch media reported on Saturday.

The works "Christ Carrying the Cross" (around 1515-16) and "The Seven Deadly Sins" (around 1500) "were made at the same time, but likely to have been made by imitators," public news broadcaster NOS said.