Egypt's top religious body demanded Wednesday that a new belly-dancing TV show be suspended for "corrupting morals" and serving "extremists" who could use it as a pretext to depict Egyptian society as anti-Islamic.

The call by Dar al-Ifta, the top body that advises Muslims on religious and life issues, follows others criticizing the show called "Dancer." But the debate over it isn't all about it being too racy for television — it's part of a concerted effort by Egypt's government to show its both challenging Islamists as a political forces while still respecting the country's more-conservative values.

Several historic buildings, including a colonial-era structure, have been blown up in Syria's second city of Aleppo, where fighting has wrought massive destruction, reports said Wednesday.

Rebel fighters destroyed "several old buildings on Tuesday night by placing explosives in a tunnel leading under the Old City of Aleppo," state television said.

"Summer of the Dead" (Minotaur Books), by Julia Keller

Small towns — where everyone knows your name and keeping secrets seems unfathomable — can be hotbeds of concealment. No one really knows what goes on behind closed doors or within a family's dynamics.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and all six other members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the country's most powerful body, made a rare public appearance Wednesday to commemorate 69 years since Japan's surrender at the end of World War II.

The ceremony was the first since Beijing earlier this year declared September 3 as a national day to mark Japan's defeat -- it signed the formal surrender on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, with China celebrating the following day.

Economic prosperity is the worst enemy of minority languages, said researchers Wednesday who listed parts of Australia and North America as "hotspots" for extinction risk.

Based on the same criteria used to determine the risk of extinction faced by animal and plant species, they concluded that about a quarter of the world's known 6,909 languages were threatened.

Germany will inaugurate the first national memorial to the estimated 300,000 ill and disabled people systematically murdered by the Nazis on Tuesday, at a ceremony with victims' relatives.

The site next to the Tiergarten park is the fourth and likely final major memorial in Berlin's city center to groups targeted in the Holocaust, following monuments dedicated over the last decade to Jewish, gay and Roma victims.

Colombia has successfully recovered from Spain hundreds of priceless, pre-Colombian artifacts smuggled out of the country more than a decade ago.

The 691 cultural treasures include carved funeral urns and conch-shaped musical instruments that, in some cases, date back thousands of years. All are from ancient societies that inhabited the northern part of the Andes prior to the arrival of Spanish explorers in the 16th century.

Members of Saudi Arabia's religious police roughed up a British resident of Riyadh after they caught him paying at a women-only cash desk, local media reported on Monday.

Saudi Arabia imposes a strict interpretation of Islamic laws, notably a segregation of the sexes.

Three top Chinese universities have vowed to tighten "ideological" control over students and teachers, as a wider clampdown on free expression in the country intensifies.

The comments came from the Communist Party committees of Peking University, Shanghai’s Fudan University, and Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, which each wrote a statement in the Communist Party theoretical journal Qiushi.

Life-sized figures sketched into red rock cliffs in Canyonlands National Park were drawn 1,000 years more recently than what had long been believed, a team of Utah State University scientists discovered about the world-renowned rock art.

The team used modern luminescence dating techniques to analyze when the art went up in what is known as the "Great Gallery" in southeastern Utah's Horseshoe Canyon. The researchers believe the figures were created 1,000 to 2,000 years ago instead of the previously thought 2,000 to 4,000 years ago.