Tens of millions of Hindu pilgrims prepared to cleanse their sins with a plunge into the sacred river Ganges, ahead of the most auspicious day of the world's largest religious festival.

Some 30 million Hindu saints, devotees and visitors were expected to take part in the Kumbh Mela on Sunday -- considered the holiest of the 55-day festival -- in north India, police said.

Teenagers in blue-and-white uniforms pour out of classrooms of this boarding school at the edge of Haiti's capital, chattering in their native language of Creole about the science test they have just taken.

"Eske ou te byen konpoze?" asks one boy in the campus courtyard. In English, it translates as "How do you think you did?"

The leader of a breakaway Amish group who ordered his followers to chop off his rivals' beards was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Friday after being convicted of hate crimes.

Fifteen others convicted in the attacks, including three of ringleader Samuel Mullet's brothers and six women, were given lesser sentences of between one and seven years in prison.

When a middle-aged South African engineer recently set out to write a novel in his native Zulu, he found himself hamstrung by a lack of words to describe modern life.

Determined not to use English as a crutch, Phiwayinkosi Mbuyazi instead created 450 new words in Zulu, the mother tongue of a quarter of South Africa's 50 million population.

A Chilean judge has ordered the remains of famed poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda exhumed as part of an investigation into his death, the foundation that manages his literary legacy said Friday.

The leftist poet, who died 12 days after the 1973 military coup that ousted socialist President Salvador Allende and brought Augusto Pinochet to power, was long believed to have died of cancer.

The U.N. cultural organization UNESCO is assessing the damage wreaked on Mali's historic city of Timbuktu and repairing the mausoleums of saints alone will cost up to five million euros, its chief said Friday.

Known as "the City of 333 Saints" or "The Pearl of the Desert", Timbuktu was listed as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1988 and is an ancient center of Islamic learning.

Women clergy will be allowed to attend meetings of the bishops who lead the Church of England for the first time in response to the vote to block women from becoming bishops, it was announced on Friday.

At least eight senior women clergy will attend and speak at meetings of the House of Bishops, although they will not be allowed to vote.

One of the most iconic paintings in French history, Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People", has been defaced by a woman allegedly suffering psychiatric problems, but no permanent damage was done.

The 28-year-old woman, who was being held by police Friday, is accused of using a black marker to deface the masterpiece at a recently opened satellite branch of the Louvre in Lens, northern France.

French art expert believes he has solved the mystery of the model in a celebrated 19th century painting as a result of an art lover's 1,400 euro antique shop purchase that could turn out to be worth 40 million euros ($53.6 million), weekly Paris Match reported on Thursday.

"The Origin of the World" (1866) by French painter Gustave Courbet depicts female genitalia but does not show the woman's face.

Far from London's beaten tourist track, a group of visitors is staring keenly at the graffiti-covered gates to an abandoned construction site.

Their guide, Karim Samuels, points out the black-and-white images of two young faces, and behind them, a piece of street art by Britain's most famous and enigmatic street artist, Banksy.