The managers of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, looted by British and French troops in the 19th century, are threatening legal action over a Chinese movie studio's sprawling $5 billion replica, state media said.

In 2007, Hengdian World Studios, the world's largest outdoor film studio, announced it planned to build a multi-billion-dollar replica of Beijing's Old Summer Palace at its headquarters some 1,500 kilometres south of the Chinese capital.

In Puerto Rico's misty, bamboo-studded mountains, elementary school students are studying a nearly extinct language, beating on drums and growing native crops like cassava and sweet potato as they learn about the indigenous people who lived on the island before Christopher Columbus.

The children in four towns in the island's southeast corner play a ceremonial ball game that was called batey by the native Tainos, who were all but wiped out during colonial times. The boys and girls also learn words from the local Arawak language, which was in part rebuilt with help from linguists, and still exists in varying forms among other native groups in the hemisphere.

Egypt said on Sunday it has recovered 123 ancient artefacts that had been smuggled outside the country and were later confiscated in New York.

Egypt's major archaeological sites were targeted for looting after the 2011 uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak. 

Britain's last surviving warship from Gallipoli is being restored to mark the bloody campaign's centenary, as a new exhibition tries to counter myths surrounding the disastrous World War I offensive.

HMS M33, one of only three British ships remaining from the whole 1914-1918 war, is being painstakingly renovated in a dry dock in Portsmouth, the Royal Navy's home on the English south coast.

The descendants of Martiros Muradyan cherish like religious relics the few objects he was able to carry with him when he fled the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman forces a century ago. 

The hand-made rugs and wooden spoons in their home in rural Armenia are the last physical reminders they possess of a life that was long ago torn apart. 

The Turin Shroud, one of Christianity's most celebrated and hotly-debated relics, went on display to the public on Sunday for the first time in five years.

More than one million people have already booked their slots to see the piece of linen that devotees believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ between now and June 24.

A replica of the French navy frigate Hermione which brought General Lafayette to America to rally rebels fighting Britain in the U.S. war of independence, will set sail for the United States again on Saturday, 235 years after the original crossing.

French President Francois Hollande is expected to be on hand to wish the ship and crew godspeed on the journey from France's Aix island to the U.S. east coast, a trip exciting sailing and history fans on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Catholic Church in the U.S. forked out $120 million to victims of sexual abuse at the hands of clergy and $30 million on pedophile prevention programs over 12 months, according to an annual report out Friday.

The bulk of the $150 million between June of 2013 and 2014 was spent on compensation, therapy and legal fees for victims, the report said, and the rest went to preventing the abuse from occurring, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said.

On the Tigris River waterfront where jihadists executed hundreds of captured Iraqi army recruits last year, bloodstains are gradually being covered by streaks of candle wax dripping down the quay.

A symbolic tombstone has been laid where Islamic State group fighters carried out their assembly-line slaughter, shooting the young mostly Shiite men in the head before tipping them into the river one by one.

A stage curtain believed to be the largest Pablo Picasso painting in North America is set to be displayed at a New York City museum.

Measuring 20 feet by 19 feet, "Le Tricorne" (luh TREE'-kohrn), or "The Three-Cornered Hat," was painted in 1919 for an avant-garde ballet troupe. It hung at the storied Four Seasons restaurant for 55 years.