Pakistan is decorating bus stops with Koranic verses and Islamic calligraphy to give a more spiritual flavor to the capital Islamabad, long considered one of the country's most liberal cities.

The Capital Development Authority (CDA) plans to roll out 100 new bus shelters -- known locally as sunshades -- painted with flowers and religious verses to spruce up the 1960s purpose-built capital.

The University of Sydney was celebrating Wednesday after a Picasso painting it was given sold for more than U.S.$20 million at a London auction, with the funds to be used for scientific research.

"Jeune fille endormie", an intimate portrait of the Spanish-born artist's lover Marie-Therese Walter, whom he met when he was 45 and she was 17, was one of three works at Christie's Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale.

Pamphlets about Queen Marie Antoinette and an account of a stuffed hippopotamus are among 250,000 books being made available online in a deal announced on Monday by Google and the British Library.

Internet users will be able to consult the texts dating from 1700 to 1870, which have been digitized by the search engine giant and chosen by the library, which has one of the world's largest collections, they said in a statement.

Hollywood star Richard Gere -- a Buddhist and a longtime campaigner for the rights of Tibetans -- on Tuesday visited a Buddhist temple during a visit to South Korea.

Gere will later this week also attend an opening ceremony for an exhibition of photographs entitled "Pilgrim" which he took in Tibet and at other sites devoted to the religion.

On the wooded slopes of southwestern Serbia's Golija mountain, a dozen nuns at the Gradac monastery have devoted their lives to God but have not turned their backs on their lifelong passion: painting.

Twenty years ago Jasna Topolski, already a famous artist who had graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, arrived at this 13th-century monastery. Today, she is Efimija, the mother superior.

A Christian religious leader in Vietnam on Monday expressed hope for reunification of a million-strong church that remains divided between north and south four decades after the end of the Vietnam War.

The Evangelical Church of Vietnam (ECVN) operates as two separate entities, with a northern church and one in the south, a split that persists long after the 1975 communist victory reunited the two halves of the country.

Hu Xinglian kneels before the corpse of Liang Zhicai and, with one hand on his metal coffin, lets out a piercing wail. But Hu is not at all grief-stricken -- she is a professional mourner.

In parts of China, where rural pre-burial rituals are still observed, mourners known as "kusangren" are hired to guarantee that a funeral is a spectacle in grief. And the 53-year-old Hu is up to the task.

Can Superman handle a Soviet machine-gun flanked by Santa Claus with binoculars and rifle, while McDonald's clown mascot Ronald drinks beer behind their backs?

All is possible in a witty pop art facelift of a symbolic Soviet army monument in central Sofia Saturday.

French sculptor Daniel Buren has decided to cancel an exhibition scheduled for mid-July in Beijing in "solidarity" with detained artist Ai Weiwei, he told Agence France Presse.

Buren, perhaps best known for his striped columns in the historic state-owned Palais Royal gardens near the Louvre in Paris, was to have shown a vast exhibit at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art from July 15.

It's a scenic jewel, a hamlet of hill-hugging chalets, elegant church spires and ancient inns all reflected in the deep still waters of an Alpine lake. Hallstatt's beauty has earned it a listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site but some villagers are less happy about a more recent distinction: plans to copy their hamlet in China.

After taking photos and collecting other data on the village while mingling with the tourists, a Chinese firm has started to rebuild much of Hallstatt in faraway Guangdong province, a project that residents here see with mixed emotions.