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.

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.