Britain will announce plans next week to allow gay marriages in churches and other religious buildings, officials said Friday, although Prime Minister David Cameron insisted no faith group would be forced to hold them.

Culture Secretary Maria Miller will unveil ministers' responses to a consultation earlier this year, which will propose that religious organizations should be able to 'opt-in' to hold same-sex weddings, according to a government source.

Two French Muslim groups have filed a lawsuit for inciting racial hatred and slander against a French satirical weekly that published cartoons of a naked Prophet Mohammed, the paper's lawyer said Friday.

Charlie Hebdo published the cartoons in September as often violent -- and sometimes deadly -- protests were taking place in several countries over a low-budget film made in the United States that insults the prophet.

Ray Emory could not accept that more than one quarter of the 2,400 Americans who died at Pearl Harbor were buried, unidentified, in a volcanic crater.

And so he set out to restore names to the dead.

A US official is taking a novel approach to diplomacy in Pakistan -- singing in a local language to build bridges in one of the world's most dangerous countries, where anti-Americanism runs rampant.

Shayla Cram, a public diplomacy officer assigned to Peshawar, the gateway to al-Qaida and Taliban strongholds in the northwestern tribal belt, has not only learnt Pashto but has penned her own Pashto-style song.

North Korea has put Kim Jong-Il's yacht in the family mausoleum and had to build a railway to get it there, a report said Friday as Pyongyang prepares to mark one year since the late leader's death.

The reclusive state has been putting together a collection of some of Kim's possessions at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang, which houses the preserved body of his father, Kim Il-Sung, Yonhap news agency said.

An Egyptian granite sculpture of a sphinx that risked ending up on the black market for antiquities is destined instead for a Rome museum.

Italian Tax Police Maj. Massimo Rossi says the sphinx, perhaps as old as the 4th century B.C., was found on the outskirts of Rome last week. It was in a box hidden in a greenhouse near an ancient Etruscan necropolis.

Plans by an Islamic group to build a giant mosque able to accommodate more than 9,000 worshippers in the shadow of London's Olympic Park have been rejected by the local authority.

Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary group with roots in India, has been trying since 1999 to build the mosque on a former chemical site in West Ham in east London, which would have become one of the biggest Islamic centres in western Europe.

Berlin will open a major new exhibition Thursday celebrating the centenary of the discovery of the 3,400-year-old fabled bust of Egypt's Queen Nefertiti as a feud with Cairo over its ownership rages on.

The show at the city's New Museum showcases its most famous treasure, considered the most priceless depiction of the female visage after the Mona Lisa, and other booty carted home by German archaeologists after the December 6, 1912 find.

Cavemen were better at drawing four-legged animals in motion in their art than modern artists, a study said Wednesday.

Most four-legged animals have a similar sequence in which they move each limb. These sequences were studied in the early 1880s by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

At the end of a research trip to an oil field in east Iraq, Ruba Husari took a detour to visit a site she had wanted to see for some time. When she arrived it was barren -- but still she was delighted.

Less than 10 kilometers (six miles) from the Iranian border, Husari's destination was nondescript and unremarkable -- a 20 minute walk from a pothole-filled road and several kilometers (miles) from the tiny village of Qalaat Muzeibleh, with the Badra oil field barely visible in the distance.