Women make up only one percent of Afghanistan's police force and as a result women are reluctant to seek justice for rising levels of violence, international aid agency Oxfam said Tuesday.

There is an average of one female police officer for every 10,000 women in Afghanistan, where reports of violence against women rose by 25 percent in 2011-2012, Oxfam said in a report.

The United States returned a Roman wine pitcher and five gold artifacts to Afghanistan on Monday in the fourth official repatriation of stolen Afghan cultural treasures in eight years.

Kabul's ambassador to Washington, Eklil Hakimi, accepted the objects from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency during a ceremony at the Afghan embassy.

A painting that sat for six decades in a Norwegian industrialist's attic after he was told it was a fake Van Gogh was pronounced the real thing Monday, making it the first full-size canvas by the tortured Dutch artist to be discovered since 1928.

Experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam authenticated the 1888 landscape "Sunset at Montmajour" with the help of Vincent Van Gogh's letters, chemical analysis of the pigments and X-rays of the canvas.

Saudi Arabia said Monday it will outlaw the dissemination of information on the Internet for the benefit of "terrorist" groups, in line with a decision taken by Gulf Arab monarchies.

The official SPA news agency said the cabinet approved the "unified legislation against cybercrime," which the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) adopted in December.

The discovery of a World War II amphibious vehicle on the bottom of an Italian lake is raising hopes among a group of American veterans that the remains of two dozen of their comrades will be found and possibly recovered for burial in the U.S.

The Italian volunteer organization that found the truck on the bottom of Lake Garda last December believes it's the same one that sank in 1945, killing 24 of the 25 U.S. soldiers aboard the open-topped vehicle known as a DUKW (duhk).

It may still have a small following, but one dance company is determined to bring ballet, with its roots in the Italian Renaissance, to urban South Africa.

Onstage pirouettes, jetes and turnouts are still very much a foreign concept for most Africans, but the South African Mzansi Ballet wants to change that.

They eat, sleep and raise their children beneath the stage floorboards and when dusk falls Thailand's travelling theaters come to life with ornate costumes, colorful face paint and high-pitched Chinese opera.

It is a generations-old way of life for the nomadic performers who tour venues ranging from sport stadiums to small Chinese shrines in back alleys. But faced with an uncertain future as the troupes struggle to attract younger audiences, supporters are turning to the Internet to widen their appeal.

German blacksmith Manfred Zbrzezny and his apprentices hammer, file and weld in a steamy, dark workshop on the outskirts of the Liberian capital Monrovia, surrounded by parts for AK-47s, bazookas and other deadly arms.

In another lifetime, these weapons were the cause of untold misery in a nation scarred by ruinous back-to-back civil wars, but now they are being transformed into symbols of hope for Liberians.

A cavernous museum on hallowed ground is finally nearing completion, far below the earth where the twin towers once stood.

Amid the construction machinery and the dust, powerful artifacts of death and destruction have assumed their final resting places inside the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

The northern Italian town where Antonio Stradivari and other master violin-makers worked will open a new museum celebrating the instrument.

Cremona will inaugurate the Museum of the Violin on Sept. 14. In a recreated violin-maker's shop, visitors can watch how the instruments are hand crafted. They can admire creations of Stradivari and other famous Cremona violin-makers, the Amati and the Guarneri families, with the instruments in protective showcases, and hear violins being played.