It's been a century since William Boase was killed in World War I's disastrous Gallipoli campaign, but the Australian soldier's family has never lost hope of giving him a proper burial.

And now that two Australian history buffs believe they have pinpointed the site of mass graves containing 143 Australian soldiers at Gallipoli, there are calls for authorities to investigate.

A "perfect" 100-carat diamond originally mined in South Africa sold for $22.1 million in New York on Tuesday in three minutes of bidding, Sotheby's said.

The auction house had valued the jewel, which weighs 100.20 carats, at $19-25 million, calling it "the largest perfect diamond with a classic Emerald cut ever to be offered at auction."

"This is the story of a failure," Marxist guerrilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara wrote in his journal after a bid to bring "revolutionary war" to the Congo 50 years ago.

Che arrived secretly at the head of a dozen Cuban fighters of black African origin on April 24, 1965, to join rebels in what today is the Democratic Republic of Congo.

More than 100 Japanese lawmakers on Wednesday paid homage at the Yasukuni war shrine, risking fresh anger from Asian neighbors that were victims of Tokyo's 20th century aggression, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe began a 10-day diplomatic push.

A cross-section of parliamentarians visited the shrine in central Tokyo as part of the spring festival, an Agence France Presse journalist witnessed.

Germany and Iraq asked U.N. member-states on Tuesday to take action against the destruction by jihadist groups of Iraq's cultural sites, which they said was tantamount to a war crime.

The two countries are to present a draft resolution to the General Assembly that calls on countries to prosecute perpetrators of cultural vandalism and prevent the trafficking of stolen artifacts. 

Egyptian poet Abdel Rahman al-Abnudi, widely known for his revolutionary verse and criticism of two toppled presidents, died Tuesday at the age of 76, his wife said.

Abnudi, who underwent brain surgery at a Cairo hospital just days ago, rose to prominence in the 1960s for his poems, some performed by legendary Arab singer Abdel Halim Hafez.

Workers at Britain's world-renowned National Gallery are going on strike this week due to a dispute over a privatization plan, a labor union said on Monday.

Staff are to strike this week and on May 1 to protest a plan for visitor services to be provided by an outside company, which the Public and Commercial Services union said is being rushed through ahead of Britain's general election on May 7.

For thousands of Syrian Armenian refugees in Lebanon, the slaughter and expulsion of their ancestors a century ago is less a historical event than an ongoing trauma.

Though their community is just one of many caught up in Syria's brutal conflict, Syrian Armenians say their fate has been particularly painful because it echoes the tragedy often termed the Armenian genocide.

They were already in their 20s the first time they ever heard about dinosaurs or even tried their hands at maths and English.

Now a group of young Israelis who left the closed world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism are demanding answers from the state which funded their strictly religious education in Jewish seminaries, known as yeshivas.

Billy Sing earned the nicknames "The Murderer" and "The Assassin" as a deadly sniper who shot more than 200 Ottoman troops during the Gallipoli campaign of World War I.

He was also part-Chinese and among thousands from non-European backgrounds, some of whom hid their identity, who joined the Australian Imperial Force to fight for their country despite being legally barred from signing up.