Hundreds of thousands of mostly barefoot Roman Catholic devotees joined a raucous procession through the streets of the Philippine capital Wednesday in an annual ritual to demonstrate faith and seek miracle cures for illnesses and a good life.

Police estimated about 500,000 people left from the parade grounds of Manila's Rizal Park for the daylong march that sees a statue of Jesus Christ pulled through the city's central district.

A rare photo showing the mushroom cloud from the Hiroshima atomic bombing in two distinct parts, one above the other, has been discovered in the city, a museum curator said Wednesday.

The black-and-white picture is believed to have been taken about half-an-hour after the bombing on August 6, 1945, around 10 kilometers (six miles) east of the hypocentre.

The United States on Tuesday returned to Italy a ceramic water vase from the sixth century BC that had been sold to an Ohio museum in 1982 by art dealers using falsified documents.

In a statement, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) said the rare Estruscan black-figure kalpis, valued at $665,000, was handed back to Italian officials following a ceremony at the Toledo Museum of Art.

In the heart of Syria's rebel territory, away from the blasts and bullets of the frontlines, another struggle is playing out: one for a new justice system that could shape the future face of the country should the regime fall.

The struggle is between ex-regime judges and Islamic jihadists, and at stake is whether the courts apply a modified version of existing Syrian law, or switch to strict sharia law.

A British-led excavation team hunting for dozens of rare Spitfires in Myanmar said Wednesday they were confident about recovering the World War II-era planes after finding a crate buried in the ground.

Project leader David Cundall, who has compared the rumored hoard to the 1922 discovery of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb, said a box found in the Kachin state capital Myitkyina appeared to contain man-made objects.

Polish prosecutors have launched an investigation into a Swedish artist's claims he used the ashes of Holocaust victims in his artwork, an official said Tuesday.

The artist, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, claims he stole ashes from a crematorium at Nazi Germany's Majdanek concentration camp in Poland in 1989 then used them in one of his paintings by mixing them with water.

Finland's capital is aglow with colorful lights and lasers piercing the black winter skies and lighting up downtown buildings providing a much-needed burst of illumination during the darkest days of the year.

Light and sound installations at the Helsinki Lux Festival brought crowds at the city landmarks joined by lanterns hanging in trees along a path of light bordering the frozen Baltic Sea through parks and on city sidewalks, where the shortest period of daylight in midwinter is about five hours long.

A painting by Henri Matisse has been recovered a quarter century after it was stolen from a Swedish museum by a sledgehammer-wielding thief.

The Art Loss Register, which tracks stolen, missing and looted art, says "Le Jardin" was found when a British dealer checked the picture against the group's database before selling it.

Rights groups urged the Indonesian government Tuesday to block a proposed law banning women from sitting astride motorcycles in deeply Islamic Aceh province, where the position is deemed "improper".

The mayor of Lhokseumawe city in Aceh, where sharia law is enforced, circulated a letter Monday explaining the obligation for women to sit side-saddle was "to avoid immoral acts".

Enrique Meneses, the Spanish journalist who scored a historic scoop photographing Fidel Castro and his rebels in the Cuban mountains during their revolution, has died aged 83, his friends said Monday.

Meneses's photographs of bearded Castro and Che Guevara in the Sierra Maestra -- where he camped with them for four months in 1957-1958 -- made the cover of Paris Match magazine and became images of reference for the uprising.