Turkey's parliament passed a law late Thursday giving Kurds the right to use their own language in court, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

The right to give testimony in their mother tongue was one of the key demands raised by hundreds of prison inmates who went on a 68-day hunger strike that ended in November.

Pope Benedict XVI put Catholic Church leaders on notice Thursday, saying social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter aren't a virtual world they can ignore, but rather a very real world they must engage if they want to spread the faith to the next generation.

The 85-year-old Benedict, who tweets in nine languages, used his annual message on social communications to stress the potential of social media for the church as it struggles to keep followers and attract new ones amid religious apathy, competition from other churches and scandals that have driven the faithful away.

Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou would consider cultural agreements with China, an official said Wednesday, triggering an angry response from the island's anti-Beijing opposition.

Lin Join-sane, chairman of the quasi-official Straits Exchange Foundation became the first Taiwanese official to raise the possibility of a culture deal and said the view reflected that of Ma's.

Uruguayans are petitioning the Royal Spanish Academy to expunge as discriminatory the expression "to work like a black" from its dictionary, the ultimate authority on the Spanish language.

"We ask that you review this expression's remaining in the dictionary," said the petition. "We, for our part, commit ourselves to erase all discriminatory expressions from our plazas, our playing fields, our schools and especially our houses."

When Kholoud Sukkariyah and Nidal Darwish married in defiance of Lebanon's ban on civil unions, they had no idea their initiative would attract so much support from fellow citizens -- and even the president.

The entire process took nearly a year and was done in secret to sidestep political obstacles.

Three Romanians allegedly involved in a spectacular theft from a Dutch museum last year were caught while negotiating the sale of the stolen masterpieces, a Romanian newspaper reported Wednesday.

Romanian police and the prosecutor's office dealing with terrorism and organised crime (DIICOT) declined to comment on the report in Evenimentul Zilei.

In just three sentences on a large wall in Cairo, the artist sums up the evolution of the Egyptian revolt: "2011, Down with Mubarak's rule. 2012, Down with military rule. 2013, Down with Brotherhood rule."

Since the start of the popular uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak, street art has become the newest form of alternative media, documenting events, struggles, highs and lows with political messages that are as gutsy as they are colorful.

The Dalai Lama is set to headline India's Jaipur Literature Festival to speak about faith with one of his biographers, Pico Iyer.

The Tibetan spiritual leader will hold a session on the festival's first day, Thursday, titled: "Kinships of Faiths: Finding the Middle Way."

Eighty years after Adolf Hitler's rise to power, a novel that imagines his return to modern-day Berlin has become a bestseller in Germany, though a comedy about the Fuehrer is not to everyone's taste.

Instead of committing suicide in his bunker on April 30, 1945, in "He's Back" (Er Ist Wieder Da), Hitler wakes up in 2011 without the slightest idea what has happened in the intervening 66 years.

A U.S. federal court handed down prison terms Tuesday to an American man and a Mexican woman for trying to sell a $3 million Henri Matisse painting stolen from a Venezuelan museum.

Pedro Antonio Marcuello Guzman, a 46-year-old resident of Miami, was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison, while 50-year-old Maria Martha Elisa Ornelas Lazo of Mexico City got one year and nine months.