On a beach outside Havana stands the crown jewel of Cuba's renowned international program of medical education, training 13,000 students from around the world free of charge.

"Studying medicine was my life's dream. But for a poor family like mine, that was impossible," 18-year-old Merady Gomez of Honduras told Agence France Presse at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM).

Dutch museums have identified 139 pieces of art, including dozens of paintings — one by Matisse and many by Dutch painters of varying renown such as Impressionist Isaac Israels — as likely having been taken forcibly from Jewish owners.

The review of Dutch art acquisitions from 1933 on was conducted by the museums themselves and focused explicitly on pieces for which there was any gap in their ownership record during the years that Germany's Nazi regime was appropriating works from Jews, either by forced sale or outright seizure.

Drawn to bling? A fan of gold jewelry? Keen on Buddha? If so, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art offers the newest ticket to fend off the winter chill.

An exhibition of exquisite treasures from ancient Korea opens in New York next week, marking the first display anywhere outside Asia of the little known Silla kingdom.

Armed with laser rangefinders, GPS technology and remote control robots, a group of speleologists is completing the first ever mapping of the aqueducts of ancient Rome on archaeology's "final frontier".

They abseil down access wells and clamber through crevices to access the 11 aqueducts that supplied Rome, which still run for hundreds of kilometers (miles) underground and along stunning viaducts.

The Australian War Memorial has reversed a contentious decision to remove "known unto God" from the Tomb of the Australian Unknown Soldier after a public outcry.

Memorial director Brendan Nelson refused to confirm The Australian newspaper's report Tuesday that Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a former Roman Catholic seminarian, had personally intervened to prevent the change.

An Iranian court has sentenced filmmaker and actress Pegah Ahangarani to 18 months in prison, her mother told ISNA news agency Monday, apparently for her social activities, political comments and interviews with foreign media.

"She has been sentenced to 18 months in the trial court," Manijeh Hekmat, who is also a director, told ISNA without giving further details.

Sweden had a head start in the good parenting debate as the first country to outlaw smacking but some argue that its child-centered approach has gone too far and children now rule the roost.

"In some ways Swedish kids are really ill-mannered," David Eberhard, a leading psychiatrist and father of six, told Agence France Presse.

Happily hunched over his iPad, Britain's most celebrated living artist David Hockney is pioneering in the art world again, turning his index finger into a paintbrush that he uses to swipe across a touch screen to create vibrant landscapes, colorful forests and richly layered scenes.

"It's a very new medium," said Hockney. So new, in fact, he wasn't sure what he was creating until he began printing his digital images a few years ago. "I was pretty amazed by them actually," he said, laughing. "I'm still amazed."

At least 16 Saudi women have received fines for taking the wheel on a day set by activists to defy the kingdom's traditional ban on female driving, police and reports said Sunday.

Only few women braved official threats of punishment and drove on Saturday in response to an online campaign headlined "Women's driving is a choice."

A private museum in southern Spain is opening an exhibition of rare Islamic art and scientific objects that highlight the use of light in decoration and studies in the Arab world.

The exhibition, "Nur: Light in art and science in the Islamic world," is sponsored by the energy company Abengoa and has gathered 150 pieces from collections such those of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and private collectors from around the world.