Smiling and wearing bright lipstick, with headscarves barely covering their hair, young Iranian women took selfies as they lined up to vote in crucial elections on Friday.

Their pictures, some posing in groups, flooded social networks as lines formed at polling stations after the electorate was urged by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to vote early.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden will be a special guest at this year's Oscar ceremony, introducing a performance by Lady Gaga, an administration official said Thursday.

Biden will take a bit of the White House to Hollywood to push an initiative countering sexual assault on U.S. university campuses.

Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt was released from prison early on Thursday after serving about four years of a five-year sentence for possessing weapons supplied by gangsters behind deadly bomb blasts in Mumbai in 1993.

The disgraced star kissed the ground and saluted at the prison as he walked free in the western city of Pune, after authorities decided to release him ahead of schedule for good behaviour.

Video streaming giant Netflix said Wednesday it is making its first original German series, to debut in 2017.

Production of "Dark", comprising 10 hour-long episodes, "is expected to start in 2016 with the series debut worldwide on Netflix in 2017," the company said in a statement.

A coming-of-age drama set among Bedouin tribesmen roaming the desert is the first Oscar contender produced by Jordan's nascent film industry.

"Theeb" (Wolf), set in 1916, tells the story of a playful 11-year-old Bedouin boy of the same name who gets caught up in his tribe's alliance with the British against Ottoman rulers during the era's Arab Revolt.

Jeremy Clarkson, the former host of hit BBC auto show "Top Gear," apologized Wednesday and paid an undisclosed sum to a producer he punched in an off-set altercation.

Clarkson was fired in March 2015 after hitting Oisin Tymon and calling him a "lazy Irish (expletive)" during a dispute at the end of a day's filming.

Forest Whitaker has not one or two copies of the script he's memorized for his Broadway debut. Not three or four copies, either. Try five.

The actor, director and producer pulled them out of his backpack recently and all of them were battered, underlined and soaked in highlighter. One was studded with little photographs he added to evoke feelings.

Menswear or womenswear -- who cares? Genderless fashion is the buzzword for many of today's top designers, highlighted at London Fashion Week by a string of androgynous touches on the catwalks.

From Christopher Kane's heavy, dark, asymmetric tailoring to Burberry's parade of male and female models in military overcoats and aviator jackets, masculine styling repeatedly stood out in the women's autumn/winter collections.

Singapore's Roman Catholic archbishop has expressed concern at an upcoming concert by pop diva Madonna in the city-state and warned his flock against supporting those who "denigrate and insult religions".

Archbishop William Goh said in a statement posted on the diocese website on Saturday that he had met various government officials to express the church's concerns about the February 28 concert, part of her global Rebel Heart Tour.

Actor Charlie Sheen's announcement last year that he is HIV-positive led to a record number of Google searches for information about the virus that causes AIDS in the United States, researchers said Monday.

"Just as with celebrities Rock Hudson's and Magic Johnson's disclosures of their HIV-positive status, Sheen's disclosure may be similarly reinvigorating awareness and prevention of HIV," said the report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine.