Is helping a pal win a contract just being friendly? What's wrong with taking the kids to the beach in the office car? And why not linger over lunch at the trattoria if things aren't too hectic at work? These are the kinds of questions that city bureaucrats pondered recently in Florence in what has been billed as Italy's first anti-corruption class for public officials.

Italy, the birthplace of the Mafia, is notorious for its problems with corruption — and these days it's awash with scandals that have tainted some of its most important public works projects. But the lessons in Florence took aim at more mundane problems: the little instances of everyday corruption that many Italians don't even recognize as being wrong.

When Pope Francis visits South Korea this week, he will find a thriving Catholic community with a social and political influence that belies its minority status in one of Christianity's most muscular Asian strongholds.

The five-day visit beginning Thursday will recognize the vicious persecution of early Korean Catholics, with the beatification by Francis of 124 martyrs executed for their faith in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In the capital of Germany, a land of beer-lovers, young craft brewers are taking on the mass market, promising to put flavour and diversity back into the national beverage.

A new generation of Japanese architects is scoring success by reinterpreting the past.

Unlike their predecessors, who modernized Japan with Western-style edifices, they talk of fluidly defining space with screens, innovatively blending with nature, taking advantage of earthy materials and incorporating natural light, all trademarks of Japanese design.

Pointing at photographs of two former Khmer Rouge leaders a day after they were sentenced to life in jail, history teacher Ung Ratha asks his students whether justice was served.

Artwork from "Calvin and Hobbes" creator Bill Watterson's three-day return to comics has brought more than $74,000 at auction to benefit Parkinson's research.

Dallas-based Heritage Auctions says the three comic strips sold Friday for a combined $74,040 to three collectors, all of whom wish to remain anonymous. Heritage had expected the strips to sell for more than $30,000 combined.

One woman has been arrested and more than a dozen are being sought by Malaysian authorities after images of a nudist sports festival triggered outrage in the Muslim-majority country, police said Friday.

A video of the gathering, called the "Nude Sport Games 2014", first appeared on social media earlier this week and went viral.

Christianity was born in ancient Palestine and remained rooted in the wider Middle East even after its conquest by Muslim armies centuries ago, but Christians now face the insecurity of jihadist threats and many are going into exile.

Here is a break-down of the situation faced by Christians in key parts of the region:

The global art market rose in value by 17 percent to a record $7 billion in the first half of 2014, according to new industry figures.

Artprice, a French company which tracks art sales worldwide, said that during the first six months of the year art works sold at public auction totalled $7.15 billion ($5.22 billion euros), up on $6.11 billion for the same period in 2013.

Dating is never easy but finding the perfect partner when you live in a tiny, remote village in the Vietnamese mountains is almost impossible. The solution? A love market.

For generations, young people from the patchwork of ethnic minority groups in northern Vietnam have gone to the local town of Sapa on a Saturday night to find their future spouse.