Rising out of the jungle on white pillars, the new Preah Vihear Museum's largest building stands empty. But Cambodian officials hope that one day it will be the place where nine ancient statues depicting a dramatic battle scene are reunited from around the world.

They came a step closer to that goal last week, when Sotheby's auction house in New York agreed to return one of the statues to Cambodia, ending a heated legal battle that began when the U.S. government filed a lawsuit last year at Cambodia's initiative to press for its return.

Between two trucks on an abandoned, garbage-strewn railway, teenagers openly shoot up drugs as children pass by on their way to school -- a daily scene in Karachi, where heroin is undermining Pakistan's efforts to combat the spread of HIV.

"You can find any drug you want in Karachi," said Shahzad Ali, his left hand swollen by repeated injections, one of tens of thousands in the city of 20 million lured to cheap Afghan heroin.

Religious authorities married 1,111 couples at a mass wedding aimed at combating rising rates of divorce and births out of wedlock, and the number of impoverished widows and divorcees forced to make a living on the streets in mainly Muslim northern Nigeria.

Thursday's wedding in Kano city comes as the Hisbah Board responsible for Shariah law has been clamping down. Thousands have been arrested in recent months for improper dress, prostitution and indecent mixing of the sexes. At one recent ceremony, a bulldozer crushed 240,000 bottles of beer.

Angels exist but do not have wings and are more like shards of light, at least according to a top Catholic Church "angelologist" who says the heavenly beings are now back in vogue thanks to New Age religions.

"I think there is a re-discovery of angels in Christianity," Father Renzo Lavatori told Agence France Presse on the sidelines of a conference on angels in a lavishly-frescoed Renaissance palace in Rome.

A Vincent Van Gogh painting that has been hidden away at a Virginia estate for decades will have a new home at the National Gallery of Art.

The rarely seen 1890 painting, "Green Wheat Fields, Auvers," depicts a landscape in bright greens and blues from northern France when Van Gogh was living just north of Paris in Auvers-sur-Oise. The painting was given to the museum by philanthropist and art collector Paul Mellon, and it has been kept in his family's home in Upperville, Virginia, since 1955.

A trove of 85 works by Spanish surrealist master Joan Miro acquired by the Portuguese government from a failing bank is up for auction with an estimated value of 30 million pounds ($49 million).

Christie's auction house said Friday the collection is "one of the most extensive and impressive offerings of works by the artist ever to come to auction," and covers seven decades of Miro's career.

The American who won a $1 million Picasso painting in an international raffle told AFP on Thursday that he celebrated with a dinner out on the town.

Jeffrey Gonano, 25, a project manager with a fire sprinkler contracting company in Pittsburgh, said he couldn't believe it when the organizers telephoned him Wednesday to say he had won.

Christie's holds its first art auction in India on Thursday, aiming to tap into a budding market for prestige purchasing among the country's fast-growing ranks of millionaires despite an economic slowdown.

The inaugural sale of 83 lots in the financial hub of Mumbai features paintings from the private collection of one of India's first families of contemporary art as well as pieces from six of the nine Indian artists deemed "national treasures" whose works cannot leave the country. It is expected to total $6 million to $8 million.

South Korea will repatriate the remains of more than 400 Chinese soldiers who were killed during the Korean War some 60 years ago, military officials said Thursday.

The South's President Park Geun-Hye offered as a goodwill gesture to return the bodies during her visit to Beijing in June.

In the mountains of southwestern Jordan, where tradition says Moses saw the Promised Land, dozens of sick dogs lay chained and starving at an isolated olive plantation.

The dogs, including 40 puppies, eat only rotten chicken wings every few days, getting just enough water and food to keep them alive to breed. But the scene that would horrify animal lovers in the West gets only a shrug from their breeder, a 27-year-old man who describes his operation as a "great tax-free business."