A statue of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi is to be unveiled opposite the Houses of Parliament in London next month, the British government announced Sunday.

The bronze statue will sit alongside figures such as World War II prime minister Winston Churchill and anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square.

Japan's crown prince has warned of the need to remember World War II "correctly", in a rare foray into an ideological debate as nationalist politicians seek to downplay the country's historic crimes.

In an unusual intervention in the discussion, Naruhito's mild-mannered broadside was being interpreted in some circles as a rebuke to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a key figure in the right-wing drive to minimize the institutionalized system of wartime sex slavery.

The world's oldest psychiatric institution, the Bethlem Royal Hospital outside London, this week opened a new museum and art gallery charting the evolution in the treatment of mental disorders.

The original hospital was founded in 1247 in what is now central London and the name spawned the English word "bedlam" meaning chaos and madness.

Far from home on Chile's Easter Island for Carnival festivities, one middle-aged American woman throws caution to the wind. Stripped down to a thong, she lets a local reveler paint her chest.

"If someone had told me I would end up walking down the street almost naked, I would never have believed it," the woman, who only gave her first name Susan, told AFP.

Carnivals and fireworks are Hong Kong's trademark Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations -- but tens of thousands of people also travel to a remote village to hurl oranges at a tree in hopes of making their wishes come true.

In a tradition stretching back more than a century, visitors to the "wishing tree" in Lam Tsuen -- a village near the city's northern border -- come from all over the city and mainland China to take part.

The Oscar-nominated film "The Imitation Game" may fudge some of the facts and amp up the drama to appeal to Hollywood audiences, but there's still a lot the film gets right about the Allied effort to crack the German armed forces' sophisticated communications code during World War II, says the owner of one of America's largest collections of Enigma encryption machines used by the Nazis.

Kenneth Rendell, a historian and collector who operates the Museum of World War II, says the movie's biggest achievements are introducing the critical wartime contributions of pioneering British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing to new audiences and showcasing the legendary complexity of the Nazi code machines, which were used for nearly every level of military communication, from the mundane to the top secret.

For more than a century he sat in a meditative pose in remote western Mongolia before being thrust into the spotlight by an unscrupulous thief.

The discovery of the near perfectly preserved mummy of a Buddhist monk born almost 200 years ago may have baffled many but it is also shining a light on how the religion venerates relics of holy figures.

Turkey has for the first time introduced a set of criteria for baklava, the sweet pastry made in the country's southeast and known across the world, the standards watchdog said Thursday.

The move is aimed at standardizing the production of the trademark dessert, which is often manufactured with counterfeit ingredients to cut costs, Turkish Standards Institute (TSE) said in a statement.

A Spanish court sentenced a man on Wednesday to 10 years in prison for crimes including the theft of a priceless medieval document considered the first guidebook to Spain's Saint James pilgrimage trail.

Police recovered the unique 12th-century manuscript in July 2012, a year after it was found to have gone missing from a safe in the famous cathedral of the northwestern city of Santiago de Compostela.

Fireworks illuminated the skies across China as millions around Asia ushered in the Year of the Sheep Thursday, kicking off festivities with an annual televised gala that got a thumbs down on social media for heavy Communist Party preaching against corruption.

China officially counts the New Year as starting from January 1 but culturally its citizens place greater importance on the lunar computation of days, reflecting centuries of traditional practice.