After 10 years of attacks on Iraqi Christians, Monsignor Pios Cacha wonders if the ancient community's days are numbered.

"Maybe we will follow in the steps of our Jewish brothers," he says.

From pianos with ivory keys to violin bows crafted with tortoise shell, musical instruments made from protected species will soon be able to roam the globe more easily -- with their own passports.

The 178-member Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) agreed on Wednesday to create a system of certificates for such instruments, which currently need a new permit each time they travel.

Egyptian security services have banned a film about the Jews of Egypt on the eve of its scheduled release, the director told Agence France Presse on Tuesday.

"The film was banned by National Security," Amr Ramses said by telephone from New York.

Some South African Catholics say they hope a new pope will reform their church to allow them to help prevent the spread of AIDS, deal with pregnancies resulting from rape, and think about allowing priests to marry.

Congregants at a progressive parish in downtown Johannesburg say a new pope should balance tradition with the needs of a flock negotiating a modern world dangerous with sexual abuse, AIDS, poverty and contempt of women.

Austria solemnly marked Tuesday 75 years since German troops crossed the border unopposed on the early hours of March 12, 1938 and "annexed" Hitler's native country into the Third Reich.

"Already on the evening of March 11 swastika flags were fluttering over Vienna and other cities, including at police headquarters in Vienna ... even though not a single German soldier had yet set foot on Austrian soil," President Heinz Fischer said at a ceremony in the capital.

A decade after the US-led invasion of Iraq, years of violence and disdain for the country's current political class fuel nostalgia for Saddam Hussein -- the man the foreign troops fought to oust.

Though accusations of ties to Saddam and his regime are used to tar politicians in Baghdad, residents of his hometown, Tikrit, express fondness for a man who, though responsible for ordering the deaths of countless Iraqis, is remembered for having imposed stability, which has long been missing.

Macedonia on Monday marked the 70th anniversary of the deportation of nearly its entire Jewish community to a Nazi death camp during World War II, while a U.S.-based diaspora group called on neighbor Bulgaria to apologize for its role in the Holocaust.

Culture Minister Elizabeta Milevska led the memorial to honor the 7,144 people who were deported. Only about 50 of them survived.

British researchers on Saturday unveiled a new theory for the origins of Stonehenge, saying the ancient stone circle was originally a graveyard and venue for mass celebrations.

The findings would overturn the long-held belief that Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in southwestern England was created as a Stone Age astronomical calendar or observatory.

A vibrant city of poets, artists and thinkers in the early 1900s, it went down in a sea of swastikas after Hitler's triumphant return: Vienna after the Anschluss lost not only many of its people, but a great deal of its talent.

On March 12, 1938, Nazi troops marched into Austria. Three days later, Austrian-born Adolf Hitler gave a rousing speech from the balcony of Vienna's Imperial Palace to a jubilant crowd of 250,000 and Austria ceased to exist as an independent state.

A filthy oil painting locked away in a museum in the northeast of England was on Saturday revealed to be an original masterpiece by Van Dyck.

The portrait was spotted when it was photographed for an ambitious project to catalogue every single one of Britain's oil paintings in public ownership in an online museum.