Japan's Mount Fuji, known for its perfectly cone-shaped volcano, was on Saturday granted World Heritage status, UNESCO said.

Fujisan, the highest mountain in Japan at 3,776 meters (12,460 feet), is one of the country's most recognizable sights. The snow-capped peak "has inspired artists and poets and been the object of pilgrimage for centuries", UNESCO said.

Italy's Mount Etna, one of the world's most "active and iconic" volcanoes, was on Friday granted World Heritage status by UNESCO.

The tallest active volcano on the European continent at 3,300 meters (10,900 feet), Mount Etna has been written about for 2,700 years and has "one of the world's longest documented records of historical volcanism," according to UNESCO.

Wearing gold-sequined Ugg boots, a bright smile and flawless brown skin that belies her 82 years, Faith Ringgold explains her "confrontational art" — vivid paintings whose themes of race, gender, class and civil rights were so intense that for years, no one would buy them.

"I didn't want people to be able to look, and look away, because a lot of people do that with art," Ringgold said. "I want them to look and see. I want to grab their eyes and hold them, because this is America."

Lebanon's renowned Baalbek International Festival, normally held in the town's spectacular Roman ruins, is to move to an alternative venue in the face of a spillover of violence from neighboring Syria, organizers said on Friday.

American soprano Renee Fleming, the festival's headline act, has also cancelled her participation in the festival, one of the Arab world's leading cultural events and a point of pride for Lebanon.

An Italian police chief long celebrated for saving 5,000 Jews during World War II was in fact a Nazi collaborator, an New York-based institute that studies Italian Jewry said Thursday.

Giovanni Palatucci, who died in the Dachau concentration camp in February 1945, aged 36, was regarded as Italy's answer to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved thousands of Jewish workers during the Holocaust.

Belief that so-called honor killings are justified is still common among Jordanian teenagers, a Cambridge University study revealed on Thursday.

The study by researchers from the university's Institute of Criminology found that almost half of boys and one in five girls interviewed in the capital, Amman, believe that killing a daughter, sister or wife who has "dishonored" or shamed the family is justified.

UNESCO on Thursday added six ancient sites in Syria including a fortress of Saladin and a Crusader castle to the endangered World Heritage list, warning that more than two years of civil war had inflicted heavy damage.

"Due to the armed conflict situation in Syria, the conditions are no longer present to ensure the conservation and protection of the Outstanding Universal Value of the six World Heritage properties," a UNESCO document said.

After an absence of 10 years, the Miss Algeria beauty contest is to resume on Friday in the western city of Oran, organizers said.

A total of 20 women aged between 18 and 26 have been carefully selected from Algeria's main cities to line up for the beauty pageant, co-organizer and jury member Hamza Ameziane told Agence France Presse on Wednesday.

A wooden beam embedded at the bottom of northern Lake Michigan appears to have been there for centuries, underwater archaeologists announced Tuesday, a crucial finding as crews dig toward what they hope is the carcass of a French ship that disappeared in the 17th Century.

Expedition leaders still weren't ready to declare they had found a shipwreck or the long-lost Griffin. The ship, commanded by the French explorer La Salle, was never seen again after setting sail in September 1679 from an island near the entrance of Green Bay, in what is now northern Wisconsin, with a crew of a six and a cargo of furs.

A vast wasteland close to St Basil's Cathedral and Red Square that once housed a giant Soviet hotel is set to become a landscaped park, Moscow officials said Tuesday as they revealed details of a 10 billion-ruble ($312 million) regeneration plan.

Hidden behind hoardings, the desolate expanse of bushes, tangled metal and concrete beside the Moscow River housed the Khrushchev-era Rossiya hotel, once Europe's largest. It was demolished six years ago but ambitious redevelopment plans under former Mayor Yury Luzhkov came to nothing.