"Xiang jiao! Banana!" says Fu Huijuan, beaming as she waves the fruit in front of her three-year-old pupil, Leon, at a Madrid nursery school.

He and his four classmates have barely learned to speak even in their native Spanish, but already they are absorbing Mandarin Chinese -- as are many adult Spaniards concerned for their job prospects.

Qatar has removed the Zinedine Zidane headbutt statue less than a month after it went on display following an outcry by conservatives, who slammed the art work as anti-Islam idolization.

The five-meter (16.4-feet) sculpture which immortalizes the headbutt delivered by the French football legend to Italian player Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final was put on display on Doha's corniche on October 3.

Marilyn Monroe will be remembered in wax at the Madame Tussauds museum in Washington.

The museum is unveiling its newest wax figure Wednesday. It will be displayed initially at Washington's O Street Museum in The Mansion on O Street.

Germany on Friday will become the first European country to allow babies born with characteristics of both sexes to be registered as neither male nor female.

Parents will be allowed to leave the field for gender blank on birth certificates, effectively creating a category for indeterminate sex in the public register.

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.