Nelson Mandela's handwritten memoirs were smuggled off South Africa's Robben Island to become an international bestseller after his release from 27 years in apartheid jail.

The manuscript's risky passage is just one of the extraordinary journeys of the island's books and the lengths taken to obtain, protect and share them in cells where learning and reading were celebrated.

From a teak clubhouse where British officers once sipped gin to an old English department store dubbed "Harrods of the East" -- the race is on to save Myanmar's colonial jewels from the wrecking ball.

Six decades after the country also known as Burma won its independence, the grandeur of the British Raj lives on in the elegant but crumbling 19th and early 20th century buildings that dot the former capital Yangon.

From the Bible of a murdered Pakistani government minister to the prayer book of a slain San Salvador archbishop, a Rome church has created a unique memorial to modern-day Christian martyrs.

At a time of outrage over anti-Christian violence in Africa, the exhibits at the Basilica of Saint Bartholomew are a poignant testament to thousands of Christians killed for their faith around the world over the past century.

Shanta Chaudhary was eight years old when her parents sold her into effective slavery for $75, sending her to scrub, cook and sweep for 19 hours a day at the house of a stranger in southwestern Nepal.

Now a strident rights campaigner, politician and one of the country's most influential women, she weeps as she recalls 18 years spent as a "kamlari", rising at 4:00 am, receiving regular beatings and witnessing rape and abuse.

The Nelson Mandela Museum on Friday opened a youth art exhibition on the South African democracy icon's life in his childhood home Qunu ahead of his 94th birthday next week.

Eight artists aged between 15 and 23 were chosen from over 100 entries to exhibit their works at the museum in the rural Eastern Cape province.

Concealed handguns carried by infamous outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow when they were fatally ambushed in Louisiana in 1934 are coming up for auction in New England.

Parker's Colt Detective Special .38 revolver and Barrow's Colt Model 1911 Government Model semi-automatic pistol are the marquee items going on the block at RR Auction's sale on September 30 in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Archeologists said Friday they have discovered a tomb about 1,200 years old, from the pre-Inca Sican era, in northern Peru.

Human remains and jewelry were found July 4 along with the tomb, likely that of a member of the aristocracy of the Sican or Lambayeque elite, head researcher Carlos Wester La Torre told Agence France Presse.

A street cleaner aims his hose at a pile of litter in a Pamplona street, sending it into a gutter -- and forcing revelers at Spain's San Fermin festival to flee to avoid getting wet.

"Watch out!" a young man dressed in white with a red scarf around his neck yells out to his two friends sitting on a nearby kerb drinking beer as the stream of water loaded with plastic cups and wrappers approaches.

Police in northern India are investigating a village council after it banned "love marriages" and barred women under 40 from shopping alone or using mobile phones in public, reports said Friday.

In a slew of restrictive measures on women's behavior, the council, or "panchayat," in the predominantly Muslim village Asara in Uttar Pradesh state also insisted women cover their heads in public, said the Press Trust of India.

The Rodin Museum, a little jewel box of a building surrounded by formal gardens and showcasing the French artist's monumental sculptures, had by most accounts lost a certain je ne sais quoi in the 83 years since it was built.

Now, for the first time since the museum opened in 1929, the public will get to see it as its architects intended. The Rodin Museum reopens Friday after a more than three-year, $9 million renovation that returned all its sculptures to their original locations inside and out, refurbished almost all of them — only "The Burghers of Calais" has yet to be cleaned up — and restored the grounds' formal French garden, fountain and reflecting pool.