World

A leading feminist organization in France said Monday it was suing the promoters of the Miss France beauty contest in a labour court, alleging they used discriminatory criteria to select participants.

The "Osez le feminisme" (Dare to be a Feminist) group, along with three failed contestants, said they were targeting the Miss France company as well as Endemol Production, which makes the annual TV program screened on the TF1 channel.

Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie museum on Monday handed back and repurchased a painting by French Impressionist Camille Pissarro looted by the Nazis from the collection of Jewish lawyer Armand Dorville.

Representatives of the Dorville family signed an agreement for the museum to return and buy back "Une Place a la Roche-Guyon" ("A Square in La Roche Guyon"), part of the Berlin institution's permanent collection.

China said Monday its launch of a new spacecraft in August was merely a test to see whether the vehicle could be re-used, denying a Financial Times report that they had tested a rocket carrying a hypersonic missile, as the US expressed concern about hypersonic missile technology and its potential military applications by China and Russia.

China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said on Monday the August launch involved a spacecraft rather than a missile and was of "great significance for reducing the use-cost of spacecraft and could provide a convenient and affordable way to make a round trip for mankind's peaceful use of space".

Norwegian police said Monday that the five victims of last week's attack were killed by a "sharp object" used by the suspect, not a bow and arrows.

"At some point he discarded or lost his bow and arrows," police inspector Per Thomas Omholt told reporters.

The husband of Kenyan distance running star Agnes Tirop appeared in court on Monday as a suspect in her killing, and was remanded in custody for almost three weeks.

Ibrahim, commonly known as Emmanuel, Rotich, was arrested last week in the coastal town of Mombasa after a dramatic late-night chase.

Canada is still reeling after the public revelation that there were remains of hundreds of children buried at Catholic boarding schools set up a century ago to forcibly assimilate the country's indigenous peoples.

Nearly six months later, the indigenous community of Kamloops, which has become symbolic of the scandal, is still struggling to heal as it continues the search for other remains and tries to identify the victims.

Activists unfurled a Tibetan flag and a banner that said "no genocide" at the flame-lighting ceremony for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in Greece on Monday.

The demonstrators produced the flag and the banner following the ceremony in Olympia attended by International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach.

Haiti's already fragile government faces a serious new crisis after one of the island nation's increasingly brazen criminal gangs kidnapped a large US and Canadian missionary group.

There has been little official reaction in Haiti, and local police did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment

A fugitive businessman accused of acting as a money launderer for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's regime said Sunday he would not collaborate with the United States, a day after he was extradited to the country from Cape Verde.

Maduro said Sunday evening in a televised address that Alex Saab's extradition on Saturday was "one of the most ignoble and vulgar injustices that has been committed in recent decades."

Facebook on Monday announced plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to build the "metaverse", a virtual reality version of the internet that the tech giant sees as the future.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been a leading voice in Silicon Valley hype around the idea of the metaverse, which would blur the lines between the physical world and the digital one.

Intelligence expert Malcolm Nance spoke to MSNBC about the ways in which the Russian government are able to wage a war against a country without even firing a shot.

Host Maria Teresa Kumar noted that President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to have taken up the playbook of Russia and created their own propaganda machine. As a Russia propaganda expert, Nance agreed, saying that the plot Russia concocted in the early 2000s, the Gerasimov Doctrine, handed Trump and his team the plan.