For thousands of Syrian Armenian refugees in Lebanon, the slaughter and expulsion of their ancestors a century ago is less a historical event than an ongoing trauma.

Though their community is just one of many caught up in Syria's brutal conflict, Syrian Armenians say their fate has been particularly painful because it echoes the tragedy often termed the Armenian genocide.

They were already in their 20s the first time they ever heard about dinosaurs or even tried their hands at maths and English.

Now a group of young Israelis who left the closed world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism are demanding answers from the state which funded their strictly religious education in Jewish seminaries, known as yeshivas.

Billy Sing earned the nicknames "The Murderer" and "The Assassin" as a deadly sniper who shot more than 200 Ottoman troops during the Gallipoli campaign of World War I.

He was also part-Chinese and among thousands from non-European backgrounds, some of whom hid their identity, who joined the Australian Imperial Force to fight for their country despite being legally barred from signing up.

The managers of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, looted by British and French troops in the 19th century, are threatening legal action over a Chinese movie studio's sprawling $5 billion replica, state media said.

In 2007, Hengdian World Studios, the world's largest outdoor film studio, announced it planned to build a multi-billion-dollar replica of Beijing's Old Summer Palace at its headquarters some 1,500 kilometres south of the Chinese capital.

In Puerto Rico's misty, bamboo-studded mountains, elementary school students are studying a nearly extinct language, beating on drums and growing native crops like cassava and sweet potato as they learn about the indigenous people who lived on the island before Christopher Columbus.

The children in four towns in the island's southeast corner play a ceremonial ball game that was called batey by the native Tainos, who were all but wiped out during colonial times. The boys and girls also learn words from the local Arawak language, which was in part rebuilt with help from linguists, and still exists in varying forms among other native groups in the hemisphere.

Egypt said on Sunday it has recovered 123 ancient artefacts that had been smuggled outside the country and were later confiscated in New York.

Egypt's major archaeological sites were targeted for looting after the 2011 uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak. 

Britain's last surviving warship from Gallipoli is being restored to mark the bloody campaign's centenary, as a new exhibition tries to counter myths surrounding the disastrous World War I offensive.

HMS M33, one of only three British ships remaining from the whole 1914-1918 war, is being painstakingly renovated in a dry dock in Portsmouth, the Royal Navy's home on the English south coast.

The descendants of Martiros Muradyan cherish like religious relics the few objects he was able to carry with him when he fled the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman forces a century ago. 

The hand-made rugs and wooden spoons in their home in rural Armenia are the last physical reminders they possess of a life that was long ago torn apart. 

The Turin Shroud, one of Christianity's most celebrated and hotly-debated relics, went on display to the public on Sunday for the first time in five years.

More than one million people have already booked their slots to see the piece of linen that devotees believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ between now and June 24.

A replica of the French navy frigate Hermione which brought General Lafayette to America to rally rebels fighting Britain in the U.S. war of independence, will set sail for the United States again on Saturday, 235 years after the original crossing.

French President Francois Hollande is expected to be on hand to wish the ship and crew godspeed on the journey from France's Aix island to the U.S. east coast, a trip exciting sailing and history fans on both sides of the Atlantic.