The relics of Saint Therese of Lisieux, a widely-revered 19th-century Roman Catholic nun, made a solemn entry into Jerusalem on Wednesday, the start of a tour of the Holy Land until May 31.

While the relics, fragments of the French saint's femur and foot bones, have been on a world tour for many years their arrival in Tel Aviv on Monday marked their first time in the land she longed to visit in life.

A half-billion-dollar effort to showcase Iraq's holiest Shiite city to the world is coming down to the wire as many contracts remain unsigned and funds are being hastily re-allocated.

Preparations for Najaf to become the Arab world's Islamic Capital of Culture next year are underway, but officials involved in its planning admit that time is short and much remains to be done.

Hinduism is the world's third largest religion and its oldest continuously practiced one, so it's somewhat surprising there has never been a major U.S. museum exhibition on Vishnu, one of its most important deities.

"Vishnu: Hinduism's Blue-Skinned Savior" is a new exhibit at Nashville's Frist Center for the Visual Arts that aims to introduce American art audiences to the visual beauty of the intricate ways Hindus throughout time have rendered their deities.

A British museum said Thursday it had agreed to return 138 sets of skeletal remains of indigenous people to Australia in what it hailed as a new approach to the delicate subject of repatriation.

London's Natural History Museum will return the remains to the Torres Strait Islands off Queensland.

Known across the region for its fine texture, the Najafi abaya is worn by all manner of VIPs from officials to oil-rich sheiks. But the men who produce the hand-made cloth, inheritors of a generations-old trade, are increasingly going out of business.

"Let me tell you something," said Kadhim, laughing bitterly while embroidering one of the full-length cloaks, spread across his lap. "If I could find a government job, I would stop all this.

Pope Benedict XVI has rejected the idea of Jesus as a "revolutionary" saying he used the "power of love" in a new book in which he also says the Jews were not responsible for Christ's death.

The pope writes in the second volume of "Jesus of Nazareth", his biography of Christ, according to an Italian version of the book, that the son of God "did not come as a destroyer, he did not bring the sword of a revolutionary".

Precious ivory artifacts which crime author Agatha Christie cleaned using her face cream after her husband had excavated them have been bought by the British Museum, it was reported Tuesday.

The prolific author was present at excavations directed by her second husband, Max Mallowan, in the former Assyrian capital of Nimrud.

The Israel Museum says a statue by French sculptor Auguste Rodin was stolen during the facility's recently completed renovation.

The nude bronze of French novelist Honore de Balzac was one of a series of studies Rodin cast for a monument to Balzac on display in Paris.

Thousands of Vietnamese jostled and climbed trees around a lake in the capital Tuesday hoping to see a rare giant turtle considered sacred by many but in desperate need of medical attention.

Dozens of workers waded chest-deep through the chilly green water in Hanoi's Hoan Kiem Lake to try to capture the giant freshwater creature for the first time, so it could be pulled to an island and treated. It is one of the world's most endangered turtles — one of only four Rafeteus swinhoei believed to be alive today — but its value to the nation transcends the natural world.

Providence smiled on Balinese seer Ketut Liyer the day U.S. tourist Elizabeth Gilbert came to visit -- her memoir, "Eat, Pray, Love", would make him richer than he ever dreamed.

The fortune teller said to be aged in his 90s -- no one knows exactly -- was a poor man when he looked into Gilbert's eyes and predicted she would live in Bali and find true love.