In the pre-dawn hours of July 22, 1974, a transport plane full of Greek commandos on a secret mission to Cyprus was shot down by friendly fire.

For more than 40 years, the exact whereabouts of the remains of 19 of the soldiers -- sent to support Greek Cypriot forces against invading Turkish troops -- has been a mystery.

Swords and battle axes drawn, shields up, combatants thrust and parry in a stunning recreation of Viking battles at the Icelandic Festival of Manitoba in Canada's midwest.

The annual Gimli summer festival dates back 126 years to the colonization of the south shore of Lake Winnipeg by Icelandic immigrants.

Pope Francis on Thursday slammed the "atrocious, inhuman and inexplicable" persecution of Christians and minorities, urging the international community not to remain silent.

"May global public opinion be ever more attentive, sensitive and active faced with the persecutions carried out against Christians, and more generally, against religious minorities," the pontiff said in a message to the Jordanian Catholic Church.

Legendary photojournalist Robert Capa may be primarily known for his dramatic black-and-white war images, but an exhibition in Budapest is casting light on his lesser-known color peacetime pictures.

For six decades after his death in 1954, Capa's color images remained largely overlooked -- until the "Capa in Color" exhibition was launched in New York last year.

Tens of thousands of people gathered in Hiroshima Thursday to mark 70 years since the atomic bombing that helped end World War II but still divides opinion today over whether the total destruction it caused was justified.

Bells tolled as a solemn crowd observed a moment of silence at 8:15 am local time (2315 GMT), when the detonation turned the western Japanese city into an inferno, killing thousands instantly and leaving others to die a slow death with horrible injuries.

When Elena and May were growing up, you didn't talk about the separatist group ETA and the decades of killings in their native Basque country. Now they are shouting and crying about it.

Actors in their forties, they are at a high school, playing out for their young audience the dramatised scenes of hatred and tension that Basques in northern Spain have suffered.

School holidays are a bad idea, at least when it comes to children's spelling and arithmetic in the short term, according to scientists in Austria.

A study by Graz University of 182 children aged 10-12 showed that after Austria's nine weeks of summer vacation, the children showed "significant falls" in these areas.

The Enola Gay was on its long flight back to its Pacific island base when co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis opened his log and scribbled down the many questions racing through his mind.

"Just how many Japs did we kill?" wondered Lewis after the dazzling silver B-29 bomber dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan -- and, in doing so, altered the course of history forever.

It's just a few cryptic notations on a badly yellowed sheet of paper, but it changed the course of world history.

An original copy of the operations order for dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, is on display at the Museum of World War II as the 70th anniversary of the attack is marked Thursday. It is being featured there along with other related artifacts.

Apparently modest reform proposals for primary education in Algeria have touched off a firestorm of protest, highlighting deep sensitivities about language and identity half a century after independence from France.

Standard Arabic has been the North African nation's sole official language since 1962, even though virtually no Algerians have it as their mother tongue and it has to be learnt at school.