Malaysian Hindu devotee Karthi Gan grimaces while tapping his feet to the beat of ritual drums as two men plunge dozens of sharp hooks into his chest and back.

The painful ritual is Karthi's way of giving thanks to the Hindu deity Muruga as part of the country's colourful annual Thaipusam festival, one of the world's most extreme displays of religious devotion.

A Japanese soldier who hid in the Philippine jungle for three decades, refusing to believe World War II was over until his former commander returned and ordered him to surrender, has died in Tokyo aged 91.

Hiroo Onoda waged a guerilla campaign in Lubang Island near Luzon until he was finally persuaded in 1974 that peace had broken out, ignoring leaflet drops and successive attempts to convince him the Imperial Army had been defeated.

The European Parliament on Thursday "forcefully condemned" laws in nearly 80 countries which criminalize or otherwise discriminate against homosexual men and women.

Some "78 countries consider consensual same-sex relations as a crime," European lawmakers said in a resolution, highlighting the fact that in several nations, such as Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, it carries a possible death penalty.

Renovators who restored pop legend Sting's Tuscan villa and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence were allegedly linked to an organised crime syndicate, Italian media reports said Thursday, citing a police investigation.

GGF and PDP Construction are accused of running an elaborate scam involving 10 million euros' ($13.61 million) worth of fake invoices in a hustle dreamt up by a known crook, the police said.

The Soviets made space dog Laika a national hero and Americans have fallen for presidential pets from Checkers to Bo. In Venezuela, a rare breed of shaggy sheepdog has come to symbolize the patriotic legacy of the late Hugo Chavez.

Venezuela's former president rescued the mucuchies, named for this Andean town where the breed originated 400 years ago, from near-extinction in 2008 by providing funding to breed the remaining 23 purebreds, and he used to delight in recalling how one early tail-wagger called Nevado fought at the side of his idol, 19th century independence hero Simon Bolivar.

Most books published in Norway before 2001 are going online for free thanks to an initiative that may have found the formula to reconcile authors with the web.

At a time when the publishing world is torn over its relationship to the Internet -- which has massively expanded access to books but also threatens royalty revenues -- the National Library of Norway is digitising tens of thousands of titles, from masterworks by Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun to the first detective novels by Nordic noir king Jo Nesboe.

Britain has granted asylum to an atheist from Afghanistan due to fears he would be prosecuted back home, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind, his lawyers said Tuesday.

The unnamed man was brought up a Muslim but after arriving in Britain in 2007 at the age of 16 gradually lost his faith, according to the university whose law school helped his case.

To those who complain that opera is an elitist indulgence served up to snobs in dinner jackets, New York's latest world premiere may come as something of a shock.

Inspired by the horrific gang rape of illiterate Pakistani woman Mukhtar Mai on orders of a village council, "Thumbprint" is a $150,000 production currently having an eight-night run in a basement theater in Manhattan.

A women's rights group sounded the alarm on Wednesday about the prevalence of child brides in mostly Kurdish areas of eastern Turkey, saying hundreds of marriages involved girls under 15.

The report by the Women's Center (KAMER) was published just days after the apparent suicide of a 14-year-old mother of two hit the headlines in Turkey, highlighting the plight of young brides.

U.S. archaeologists have uncovered the tomb in southern Egypt of a previously unknown pharaoh who ruled 3,700 years ago, antiquities officials said on Wednesday.

The discovery by a team from the University of Pennsylvania provides new evidence that at least part of Egypt may have escaped the rule of the Hyksos, invaders from what is now Syria who dominated the Nile Delta between the 18th and 15th centuries BC, the officials said.