The sumptuous gardens of Castel Gandolfo, a summer getaway for centuries of popes, have opened to the public at the behest of Pope Francis, the Vatican Museums announced Monday.

"It took a man like Francis" to open the grounds to all, museum director Antonio Paolucci said in a statement, describing the gardens as a place "where the splendor of art and the glory of nature combine in an admirable balance".

The Temple of Venus and walls of a tomb and shop in the long-neglected ruins of Pompeii near Naples have been damaged, possibly due to heavy rain, officials said on Monday.

Custodians found that a two-metre wall of an ancient shop in the ruined city -- which had recently been restored -- had collapsed under the weight of another wall that crumbled onto it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is repeating history by acting in Crimea much like Adolf Hitler did in central and eastern Europe in the late 1930s, a former Czech foreign minister said in an interview Monday.

"What's happening in Ukraine is history repeating itself," Karel Schwarzenberg said in an interview with Austrian daily Osterreich.

A year after Hugo Chavez's death, dozens of mourners still trek daily to his mausoleum atop a hillside slum overlooking downtown Caracas.

There, in the century-old military barracks where Hugo Chavez commanded a failed 1992 coup, El Comandante rests in a marble tomb flanked by soldiers wearing the hussar-style uniform that independence hero Simon Bolivar favored, including a tight jacket adorned with gold braid and a tall black hat with a chin strap.

Malcolm X and rap music have always fit together like a needle in the groove, connected by struggle, strength and defiance. But three recent episodes involving the use or misuse of Malcolm and other black icons have raised the question: Has rap lost touch with black history?

Chart-topping rapstress Nicki Minaj provoked widespread outrage with an Instagram post featuring one of black history's most poignant images: Malcolm X peering out the window of his home, rifle in hand, trying to defend his wife and children from firebombs while under surveillance by federal agents. Superimposed on the photo: the title of Minaj's new song, which denigrates certain black men and repeats a racial epithet 42 times.

Dozens of works of art were secretly taken from a storage facility at Cuba's flagship National Museum of Fine Arts and some have surfaced across the Florida Straits in Miami, museum and gallery officials said Friday.

In a statement posted online, Cuba's governmental National Council of Cultural Heritage acknowledged what it called a major loss for the museum, located on a main boulevard in central Havana.

U.S. officials have seized an ancient Roman sarcophagus lid from a New York City storage facility on behalf of Italian officials who say it was looted from Italy decades ago.

A marble statue of a reclining half-clad female is carved in the lid of the funeral box.

Early Native Americans spent millenia living on the Bering Land Bridge now buried under water before they appeared in Alaska and the rest of the North America, researchers said Friday.

The finding provides answers to a long-running mystery about where the people who first set foot on the New World survived the last Ice Age after splitting from their Asian relatives 25,000 years ago.

Cambodia's floating villages have adapted to the ebb and flow of Southeast Asia's largest lake for generations, but modernization and a scarcity of fish are now threatening their traditional way of life.

Houses, schools, hairdressers and even dentists -- entire communities bob around on the Tonle Sap, whose waters rise and fall dramatically with the seasons.

Myanmar's president has asked parliament to consider an intermarriage law, spearheaded by an extremist monk, that is aimed at "protecting" Buddhists in the former junta-ruled nation.

The move follows several waves of anti-Muslim violence that have coincided with a groundswell of Buddhist nationalism.