Scottish artist Martin Boyce, whose works include a modernist reworking of a library table and artificial trees, on Monday won Britain's Turner Prize at a ceremony in Gateshead, north-east England.

On picking up the £25,000 ($39,100, 29,200 euros) award at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, 44-year-old Boyce paid tribute to his parents and highlighted the importance of teachers in light of the government's spending cuts.

Japan on Tuesday returned to South Korea more than 1,000 volumes of historical documents it seized during its colonial rule of the peninsula in a gesture aimed at improving prickly relations.

A traditional troupe greeted the arrival of the 1,200 volumes at Incheon airport west of Seoul. After a ceremony attended by South Korean and Japanese officials, the books were to be transported to a state museum in Seoul.

Clarence Pfundheller was standing in front of his locker on the USS Maryland when a fellow sailor told him they were being bombed by Japanese planes.

"We never did call him a liar but he could stretch the truth pretty good," Pfundheller said. "But once you seen him, you knew he wasn't lying."

After dangerous, dusty assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan, photographer Michael Kamber has chosen a tough area of New York City as the new backdrop for his interest in war.

The award-winning journalist recently opened a gallery in the Bronx, the first in the borough, and he hopes that his gesture will both help photographers and build bridges with a neighborhood that, while not at war, certainly knows the harder side of life.

Sam Lau picks up his sword and waves it in a series of terrifying slashes as he runs towards a student, who retreats laughing nervously. All around them, kung fu students grapple fiercely.

The pupils have come to Lau's Hong Kong studio -- some from as far away as Italy -- to hone their moves in the kung fu style called wing chun, which is on the rise again decades after the death of its most famous follower, Bruce Lee.

For 700 years Catholic faithful expressed their devotion to the Virgin Mary by creating an elaborate wardrobe for the mother and child, on display in a new exhibit in the French city of Lyon.

Playfully entitled "Fashion Icon", the show explores how from the 12th to the 19th centuries, clothes were cut to adorn the Virgin, sometimes becoming objects of worship in their own right.

More than 2,800 so-called honor attacks -- punishments for bringing shame on the family -- were recorded by Britain's police last year, according to figures released Saturday.

At least 2,823 incidents of "honor-based" violence took place, with the highest number recorded in London, the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organization (IKWRO) found.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe late Friday condemned the "disgraceful" desecration of an abandoned Jewish cemetery in Pristina where graves were daubed with Nazi graffiti.

"As the leading international human rights organization in Kosovo, the OSCE wholeheartedly condemns this disgraceful act," the acting head of the OSCE mission in Kosovo, Edward Joseph, said in a statement.

Experts have reclassified a painting of an old man long thought to have been made by one of Rembrandts' students as having come from the hand of the Dutch master himself, after X-ray analysis revealed outlines of a self-portrait of the artist as a young man underneath.

Ernst van de Wetering of the Rembrandt Research Project cited the new X-ray scans of the painting "Bearded Old Man," in addition to stylistic analysis and circumstantial evidence in support of the conclusion.

A French court on Friday convicted five men arrested in an FBI sting after stealing paintings by Monet, Sisley and Brueghel and sentenced them to between two and nine years in prison.

The thieves, who pulled off the brazen heist in 2007 at the Musee des Beaux-Arts Jules Cheret in Nice, had claimed they were enticed by the FBI to commit the crime.