As U.S. President Barack Obama lounged with his family on a Massachusetts beach Thursday, the White House released a list of six books that he took on vacation.

The always keenly watched -- some say overwatched -- presidential reading list included some unsurprising choices, such as Ron Chernow's acclaimed biography of first president George Washington.

The United States on Thursday returned to French authorities an oil painting by Pablo Picasso that was reported stolen from a major Paris museum 14 years ago.

"The Hairdresser," which Picasso created in Paris in 1911 during his Cubism period, was seized by U.S. customs agents in New Jersey.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday will make a statement just ahead of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

His remarks will be closely watched by Asian neighbors China and South Korea, which suffered from Tokyo's 20th century militarism. They warn any watering down of previous statements with explicit apologies would jeopardize diplomatic ties.

A Paris beach event celebrating Tel Aviv attracted a handful of visitors but a huge number of journalists, riot police and security guards on Thursday, as well as a much larger "Gaza Beach" protest.

Bemused locals who headed down to "Tel Aviv Sur Seine" had to maneuver through bag checks, security pat-downs and metal detectors to reach the small stretch of sand on the banks of the Seine. 

A Japanese court on Thursday sentenced a South Korean monk to six years in prison for stealing a Buddha statue and a set of scriptures from an island that has long been a historic gateway between the two nations.

Kim Sang-ho, 70, together with four other South Koreans, stole the statue and 360 volumes of Buddhist scripture, worth around 110 million yen ($884,000) in total, according to the ruling by the Nagasaki District Court.

"La Coiffeuse," a cubist work by Picasso worth about $15 million, will be returned to France where it was stolen 17 years ago, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

The painting, whose name means "The Hairdresser," was recovered last year around Christmas, wrapped in parcel paper. 

Even Cubans who don't speak a word of English eat "un cake" on their birthdays.

They wear "los tennis" and "bloomers." Their kids go crazy for Taylor Swift and "The Big Bang Theory." U.S. science fiction master Ray Bradbury has pride of place on their bookshelves beside revolutionary poet Jose Marti.

Before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech to hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Washington in 1963, he fine-tuned his civil rights message before a much smaller audience in North Carolina.

Reporters had covered King's 55-minute speech at a high school gymnasium in Rocky Mount on November 27, 1962, but a recording wasn't known to exist until English professor Jason Miller found an aging reel-to-reel tape in a town library. Miller played it in public for the first time Tuesday at North Carolina State University.

Determined to rise high enough for their prayers to be heard, climbers defy the stifling summer heat to conquer a summit in Algeria's northern Kabylie region.

They are women desperate for children, youth seeking jobs, and the sick hoping for a cure.

Now 73 and sitting in his Tokyo home, Yohachi Nakajima fights back tears when he thinks of his Chinese adopted mother and the farming village he once called home -- a boy lost inside imperial Japan's crumbling empire.

He was just three years old when Tokyo surrendered on August 15, 1945, ending World War II but also leaving about 1.5 million Japanese stranded in Manchukuo, Tokyo's puppet regime in northeastern China.