The share of women in the world's parliaments has risen to a new high topping 20 percent, with quotas the driving the surge, the International Parliamentary Union said Tuesday.

"Since parliaments exist, this is the first time in history that there's been one woman for every four men," said Anders Johnsson, head of the Geneva-based IPU, which groups 162 national legislatures.

His grandfather ran a Gulag prison camp, but he is "not ashamed", the descendant of a Stalin official tells the hushed audience to whom he is narrating his relative's life.

Sixty years after Joseph Stalin's death, descendants of officials who were part of the dictator's regime testify in a theatrical show staged at a Moscow human rights museum.

UNESCO is ready to send experts to Mali to assess damage to cultural treasures in the troubled north as soon as security conditions allow, its director general said Monday.

Irina Bokova, on a visit to U.N. headquarters in New York, told journalists UNESCO's action plan for Mali, still was not fully funded.

Dutch police on Monday arrested a young Romanian woman in Rotterdam on suspicion of helping get a haul of masterpieces stolen from the city's Kunsthal museum out of the country, police said on Monday.

"Detectives investigating the art heist at the Kunsthal on Monday afternoon arrested a 19-year-old Romanian woman who is suspected of being involved in the handling of the seven stolen paintings," Rotterdam police said in a statement.

A property developer in Germany at the center of running protests over part of the once-detested Berlin Wall being knocked down said on Monday that the dismantling had been temporarily halted.

While dozens of protestors again gathered at the Wall's longest surviving stretch, Maik Uwe Hinkel, the head of the company Living Bauhaus, said in a German newspaper that he was open to compromise.

A group of South Korean women forced into wartime sexual slavery by Japan filed a defamation suit Monday against a little known, far-right Japanese rock band for calling them prostitutes.

A CD containing a song with the allegedly defamatory lyrics by the band "Scramble" was mailed -- along with a translated text -- to a shelter caring for so-called "comfort women" in Gwangju, south of Seoul, last week.

Brazil's rising economic prosperity is transforming the lives of millions of domestic workers, who are abandoning jobs cooking and cleaning in homes to find other employment.

In this huge South American country, 6.1 million women are domestic helpers, representing about 15 percent of the country's female labor force, according to a 2011 survey by the country's National Statistics Bureau IBGE.

Vienna's Kunstkammer gallery opened Friday after a 10-year restoration with an exhibition featuring a golden sculpture thought to be the world's most precious salt cellar.

Crowds flocked to see the over 2,000 treasures from the Habsburg collections, from tapestries and bronze statuettes to intricate works of gold, silver and ivory, and exotic objects including the alleged horn of a unicorn.

The Catholic Church has time-honored answers to the centuries-old question of how to run its affairs between popes.

The period known as "Sede Vacante" ("Vacant See") lasts between the death -- or in this highly unusual case the resignation -- of a pope until his successor is elected.

Damage wreaked on the Statue of Liberty by Hurricane Sandy has yet to be fully repaired, and it remains unclear when the New York icon will again welcome tourists from around the world.

"We do not have a reopening timeline yet," said spokeswoman Linda Friar of the National Park Service, the U.S. government agency that oversees the statue and the small island in New York harbor on which it stands.