Iraq's antiquities minister says the Baghdad National Museum has gotten back nearly 500 artifacts recovered by U.S. Army commandos during a recent raid in Syria targeting the Islamic State group.

Minister Adel Fahad Sharshab pledged that authorities will recover all missing artifacts. He spoke Wednesday as the recovered pieces were on display.

A Samsung company on Wednesday removed online cartoons attacking a U.S. hedge fund's founder as a ravenous, big-beaked vulture after Jewish organizations protested similar smears in South Korea's media.

The hedge fund, Elliott, is opposing a takeover deal between two Samsung companies that critics say will ensure the current generation of Samsung's founding family retains control over South Korea's biggest conglomerate.

Grave robbers have stolen from a crypt the head of German expressionist cinema great Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, director of the silent-film vampire classic "Nosferatu", reports said Wednesday.

Police did not rule out an occultist motive after finding candle wax in the family crypt in Stahnsdorf southwest of Berlin and were investigating the case on charges of theft and disturbing the peace of the dead.

South Korea has decided to return one of two ancient Buddha statutes that were stolen by Korean thieves in Japan three years ago, the prosecutor general's office said Wednesday.

Although Japan had demanded the return of both Korean-made statues, the prosecutor said the second likeness would remain in South Korea pending the resolution of a dispute over its original ownership.

A former SS officer known as the Bookkeeper of Auschwitz said he was "very sorry" for his time stationed at the death camp, ahead of a verdict expected Wednesday in his trial.

"No-one should have taken part in Auschwitz," Oskar Groening, 94, told a court in the northern city of Lueneburg Tuesday.

Slovenian retro-avantgarde rock group Laibach has announced it will become the first foreign rock outfit to perform in North Korea this August as part of their Liberation Day Tour.

Founded in 1980 in former Yugoslavia, Slovenia's best-known music export frequently courts controversy with its deliberately ambiguous use of political and nationalist imagery.

Bookstores opened at midnight when copies of Harper Lee's eagerly awaited, but controversial second novel flew off the shelves more than half a century after the groundbreaking success of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

The global release of "Go Set a Watchman" has been feted as one of the biggest literary events in years. 

A Russian atheist social networking page was blocked Monday on the back of a court ruling that it insulted the feelings of religious believers.

The group called "There is no God" on the VKontakte networking site -- which had over 26,000 followers -- went offline for users across the whole country.

For years, Christian pilgrims have waded into the Jordan River from both its eastern and western banks to connect with a core event of their faith — the baptism of Jesus. The parallel traditions allowed Jordan and Israel to compete for tourism dollars in marketing one of Christianity's most important sites.

But now UNESCO has weighed in on the rivalry, designating Jordan's baptismal area on the eastern bank a World Heritage site. The U.N. cultural agency declared this month that the site "is believed to be" the location of Jesus' baptism, based on what it said is a view shared by most Christian churches.

It was home to the army of colonial bureaucrats who ran India, so it was perhaps inevitable that the original 18th-century plans for Kolkata's Writers' Building would be found buried under reams of paperwork.

"We even wrote to the British Library in the hope that some of the drawings might have been preserved there," says architect Madhumita Roy as she talks through some of the problems her team has faced trying to restore one of India's most iconic buildings to its original glory.