Bullet holes pock the vault door and empty display boxes litter the showroom floor of Abidjan's Museum of Civilization, robbed of 100 ancient artifacts under the cover of deadly conflict in April.

"A piece of our history has been wiped out," museum director Silvie Memel Kassi laments of the collection's lost crown jewels, some dating back to the 17th century, that may now be melted for the gold.

Tsinghua University first-year student Mia Wang has confidence to spare.

Asked what her home city of Benxi in China's far northeastern tip is famous for, she flashes a cool smile and says: "Producing excellence. Like me."

Tucked away in an alley in one of Cairo's oldest quarters, Nasser Mustafa painstakingly welds small metal pieces that will come together to form a traditional lantern.

Egyptians turn to the lantern, known as a fanoos, as part of the tradition of the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset in a process intended to light one's path toward prayer and God.

The house where American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe lived in poverty for several years in the 1800s, and which now serves as a museum, could soon be forced to close its doors for evermore.

For the second year running, the house, situated off the beaten path in a poor part of Baltimore, in the eastern U.S. state of Maryland, has received no funding from the city, which has its own financial woes.

It was only a few months after their wedding in Lebanon that Suha's husband began what would be eight years of brutal beatings that left her bruised, bleeding and all but broken.

But two years ago, she decided to take matters -- and her three children -- into her own hands, in a country that has yet to pass a bill criminalizing domestic abuse and marital rape and where women are banned from granting their children citizenship.

Nepal will host its first international literary festival this September which will shine a global spotlight on writing from the Himalayan nation, festival organizers said Friday.

The three-day Kathmandu Literary Jatra (festival) will be staged in historic Patan Durbar Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site near the capital Kathmandu, from September 16-18.

The New South Wales State Library in Australia launched a "search and rescue" mission on Friday to revive lost indigenous languages, using the letters and diaries of early British settlers.

When the British first arrived on the shores of what became Sydney Harbour in 1788, an estimated 250 local languages were spoken in Australia, but many have been lost.

A dull-looking chart projected on the wall of a university office in Jerusalem displayed a revelation that would startle many readers of the Old Testament: the sacred text that people revered in the past was not the same one we study today.

An ancient version of one book has an extra phrase. Another appears to have been revised to retroactively insert a prophecy after the events happened.

A remarkable trove from Pakistan's little-known Buddhist past has gone on show in New York in an art exhibition that defied floods, riots and explosive U.S.-Pakistani relations before finally crossing the world.

The against-the-odds exhibition, "The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara," features sculptures that have mostly never before been seen in the United States.

Ornately jeweled Easter eggs designed by Karl Faberge for the Russian royal family are among hundreds of Faberge objects on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

"Faberge Revealed" includes imperial Easter eggs and other pieces from VMFA's own collection, along with sculptures and other works loaned from three private collections, making the exhibit the largest public Faberge collection in the United States, said Geza von Habsburg, a Faberge expert and the exhibit's guest curator.