School children in New York are likely to get two extra days off to mark the biggest annual Muslim holidays if the city's next mayor gets his way.

New York schools currently have mandatory holidays for the Christian festivals Easter and Christmas, and the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Passover.

A Jewish family's claim to one of Austria's most famous artworks by Gustav Klimt is shaping up as a test of the country's restitution drive and willingness to right old wrongs.

The 34-meter-long (112-foot) and two-meter-high "Beethoven Frieze", a jewel of Jugendstil art, has been a Vienna tourism highlight since 1986.

Beirut ranked 20 in the list of the world's top tourist destinations, the Ministry of Tourism announced on Thursday.

"Beirut came before Paris, Melbourne, Venice and Barcelona on the list of tourism magazine Conde Nast Traveler,” the ministry said in a released statement, noting that the magazine's annual list is based on “its readers' choices.”

Some 1.4 million Muslim pilgrims who came from 188 countries started leaving Saudi Arabia on Thursday at the end of this year's largely incident-free hajj.

Although the hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam, comes to a close officially on Friday, pilgrims are allowed to leave a day early after taking part in the stoning of the devil ritual.

France's top appeals court on Wednesday upheld a fraud conviction and hundreds of thousands of euros in fines against the Church of Scientology for taking advantage of vulnerable followers.

The Cour de Cassation rejected the organisation's request that a 2009 conviction for "organised fraud" be overturned on the grounds it violated religious freedoms.

A debt-ridden onetime aide to Imelda Marcos wrongly sold a hidden treasure: a $32 million Monet painting the former Philippine first lady had acquired and her country wants back, prosecutors said Wednesday as the ex-assistant's conspiracy trial opened.

In a New York courtroom, Vilma Bautista is facing charges that invoke the tangled history of Philippine officials' efforts to reclaim items from Marcos and her late husband, former President Ferdinand Marcos.

Mauritania, Haiti and Pakistan rank among the countries with the highest prevalence of modern slavery, according to a new global index released Thursday by an anti-slavery charity.

The "Global Slavery Index" report by the Walk Free Foundation ranked 162 countries by estimating the number of people in each nation affected by a range of practices including forced and bonded labor, human trafficking, forced marriages, and the use of children in the military.

Sydney's celebrated Opera House was Thursday declared Australia's best-known icon ahead of its 40th birthday this weekend, in a report that said it was worth Aus$775 million to the economy every year.

The Opera House is more highly esteemed abroad than "national brand Australia itself", accounting firm Deloitte said in a report prepared to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the building's opening Sunday.

A Chinese family is seeking a former Jewish refugee in Shanghai to return 2,000 of his books they kept safe for 70 years, media reports said Thursday.

Shanghai was home to tens of thousands of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution in Europe from the 1930s.

Taiwan is set to send hundreds of artifacts to Japan next year including a jade cabbage, its most treasured masterpiece, in the island's first ever loan to its former wartime enemy.

The Taipei-based National Palace Museum said it will lend 231 pieces and sets ranging from paintings and calligraphy to bronze, china, jade and embroidery to the Tokyo National Museum and Kyushu National Museum from June to November 2014.