The violin played by the bandmaster of the Titanic as the liner sank beneath the waves is to go on display at a museum marking the tragedy in Northern Ireland, officials said Monday.

The instrument belonging to Wallace Hartley was found strapped to his body after he drowned with some 1,500 others on board the supposedly unsinkable ship in 1912.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh vowed Monday severely to punish those to blame for recent Hindu-Muslim clashes that left 49 people dead, as he met people displaced by the violence.

Singh said his government would work with local authorities to help victims of the unrest, which erupted earlier this month in the village of Muzaffarnagar in India's most populous state Uttar Pradesh.

The billionaire media mogul who brought Miss World to Indonesia lashed out at the government Monday for bowing to Muslim hardline pressure by moving the entire beauty pageant to Bali.

But Hary Tanoesoedibjo, head of MNC media group, the local organizer of the event, conceded the whole contest would now be held on the Hindu-majority island as there was no other option but to follow the authorities' orders.

Relatives have shot dead three women in a lawless tribal area of northwest Pakistan after one of them left her husband, officials said Monday.

The "honor" killings happened in Jawaki village in the Darra Adam Khel district, between the cities of Peshawar and Kohat.

An Australian inquiry into church and institutional child abuse began public hearings Monday, with warnings that widespread and "shocking" allegations would be heard against places of worship, orphanages, community groups and schools.

Justice Peter McClellan opened the hearings in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, announced by the government last November, saying that thousands of people had so far come forward.

Perched away from the world on the rocky southern tip of Africa, the town of Hermanus rose to global whale-watching renown almost by chance.

Two decades ago, as South Africa emerged from apartheid-induced isolation, pop zoologist Mark Carwardine visited Hermanus while researching a book on the world's best spots to watch whales.

Slovenia's prime minister, Alenka Bratusek, on Saturday laid the foundation stone for what will be the country's first mosque -- 44 years after the initial request to build it was made.

The laying of the stone, in the presence of a government minister from Qatar which is helping to fund the project, was a "symbolic victory against all forms of religious intolerance", said Bratusek, adding that Europe would not be as culturally rich without Islam.

Mexicans received their first chance Friday to see three pre-Hispanic stone carvings that were returned by the Lowe Art museum in Miami after they were apparently removed illegally from Mexico.

Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History says the three stone pieces depict a serpent, a water god and a priest or nobleman.

The Miss World beauty contest, which has attracted fierce opposition by hardline Islamic groups in host country Indonesia, is now facing another challenge -- a rival pageant exclusively for Muslims.

The Muslimah World contest to be held on Wednesday in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, is "Islam's answer to Miss World", the pageant's founder Eka Shanti said Saturday.

A 43-year-old man is to become the first openly gay candidate to stand for office in Turkey, local media said Saturday.

Can Cavusoglu announced he would run for mayor as an independent candidate in Bulancak, a town of 60,000 people on the Black Sea, the Hurriyet Daily News reported.