President Barack Obama is leading against challenger Mitt Romney in a straw poll at Harry's Bar, an iconic Paris watering hole which has held a vote ahead of U.S. elections since 1924 and only got the results wrong twice.

The birthplace of the Bloody Mary and the haunt of the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Harry's New York Bar -- a small corner of Manhattan in the heart of Paris -- is the best election soothsayer, its owner said.

The plunge in Iran's currency is proving bad for business in neighboring Iraq.

Yousif Jassim Mohammed would know. The Iraqi merchant's gift shop sits on prime real estate opposite the gold-domed Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, one of the holiest sites for Shiite Muslims and a huge draw for the busloads of Iranian pilgrims that form the bedrock of Iraq's tourist trade.

A theatre in Athens on Thursday said it would end performances of an American play portraying Jesus Christ as homosexual that sparked violent protests by neo-Nazi groups.

"Corpus Christi performances are ending," the play's translator and its director said in a joint statement.

Peruvians celebrated "criolla" folk music Wednesday, a decades-old October 31 tradition that some musicians say is being threatened by the onslaught of Halloween, imported from abroad.

Criolla (Homegrown) Music Day was established in 1944 as a time for songwriters, composers and performers to come together with Peruvians from all social strata to celebrate their music together.

Mosammat Shahanara, 22, is a rare breed in Bangladesh: a qualified professional female driver, and she is ready to hit the road in a new career that should bring her independence and an income.

Shahanara, who comes from a poor village in the southwest of the country, is one of 21 women to be the first graduates from a training scheme designed to promote women drivers and challenge deep gender prejudices.

The deal is simple: I marry your sister and you marry mine. No dowry necessary. But if one marriage fails, the other must end as well.

Such is Sheghar, or swap marriage, a widely practised tradition in impoverished Yemen. Beyond tying the knot between two people, it links the future of two families in a potentially disastrous arrangement.

Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei said Wednesday he had begun returning $1.3 million donated by supporters for his unsuccessful legal battle against tax authorities.

Supporters helped Ai raise the cash, which was required as a bond to contest a $2.4-million fine by the Beijing tax bureau last year. A city court rejected his final appeal last month.

Archaeologists in eastern Bulgaria say they have unearthed the oldest prehistoric town ever found in Europe, along with an ancient salt production site that gives a strong clue about why massive riches were discovered in the region.

Excavations at the site near the modern-day town of Provadia have so far uncovered the remains of a settlement of two-storey houses, a series of pits used for rituals as well as parts of a gate, bastion structures and three later fortification walls -- all carbon dated between the middle and late Chalcolithic age from 4,700 to 4,200 BC.

A Chinese government think tank is urging the country's leaders to start phasing out its one-child policy immediately and allow two children for every family by 2015, a daring proposal to do away with the unpopular policy.

Some demographers see the timeline put forward by the China Development Research Foundation as a bold move by the body close to the central leadership. Others warn that the gradual approach, if implemented, would still be insufficient to help correct the problems that China's strict birth limits have created.

Right now Clementine Dupraz is busy slicing a chocolate cake, but soon she may be running a luxury hotel, or crunching numbers in a bank. For this Swiss school trains the elite of world hospitality, teaching them to talk both food and money.

"Finance has become a more and more important part of the industry," explained Fabien Fresnel, dean of Lausanne's Hospitality Management School, an ultra-modern facility set on the hills above the city.