Seventy years after the Nazis encircled Leningrad, the diary of a teenage girl chronicling the World War II siege has been published, sparking comparison with Anne Frank.
In May 1941, Leningrad teenager Lena Mukhina started writing a diary, pouring out her hopes and fears, her crush on a classmate called Vladimir and worries about bad marks.

An artist has recreated Leonardo da Vinci's most famous sketch "Vitruvian Man" in the Arctic ice to draw attention to the ice melt, Greenpeace said Wednesday.
The Arctic ice cap has shrunk to almost the same level as in 2007 when it was at a record low.

The red brick walls of the synagogue in Gora Kalwaria, once a center of Jewish culture in Poland, reverberate anew with music lost in the Holocaust, thanks to one man's search for his Polish roots.
In the 1930s, a group of Jewish mandolin players from this small town just south of the capital Warsaw gained popularity across the country before many of them perished at the hands of Poland's Nazi German occupiers.

In the insular Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the phallus is an ancient symbol commonly painted on houses to ward off evil spirits, but it is increasingly rare in the modernizing national capital.
The demise of this traditional motif, still seen all over in rural areas, points to profound changes underway in a country that has gone to extraordinary lengths to shield its unique local culture from outside influence.

Italian authorities have arrested a 52-year-old man suspected of vandalizing one of the fountains in Rome's landmark Piazza Navona.
The suspect, who comes from Rome, was apprehended in the city center overnight after police recognized him by his distinctive shoes, said the sources.

He survived the Holocaust carrying the solemn portraits he drew of concentration camp prisoners who labored alongside him in one of the largest counterfeiting operations in history. For decades, those portraits have rarely been seen.
Now the collection of 43 drawings by Felix Cytrin of his fellow Jewish prisoners have been donated to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial and museum, where researchers can study them and they will be exhibited for public viewing.

Greek police say they have recovered a painting by Flemish master Pieter Paul Rubens which had been stolen from a museum in Belgium in 2001. Two people have been arrested.
Police spokesman Panagiotis Papapetropoulos says the painting had been certified by experts from the Culture Ministry as being genuine. He did not have the name of the painting, which was being guarded by police in Athens.

Prominent Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi died in Beirut on Thursday aged 82, the American University of Beirut at which he taught for more than half a century announced.
Born a Protestant on May 2, 1929 in multi-confessional Lebanon, Salibi gained a reputation as the leading historian on his country, penning "The Modern History of Lebanon" and "A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered."

Archeologists say they have located and excavated the ruins of a massive amphitheater used to train gladiators east of Vienna in what they call a "sensational discovery."
They say that the ruins located through ground radar measurements rival the Colosseum and the Ludus Magnus in Rome in their structure. The Ludus Magnus is the largest of the gladiatorial arenas in the Italian capital, while the Colosseum is the largest amphitheater ever built in the Roman Empire.

Indian-administered Kashmir's first major literature festival has been canceled after local writers and artists said it would give the false impression that basic freedoms are allowed in the troubled region.
The Harud literary festival was scheduled for Sept. 24-26 in Srinagar, Kashmir's largest city and the main hub of opposition to Indian rule.
