A private collector has paid a world record Aus$495,000 (U.S.$508,000) for one of Australia's first coins, known as the "Holey Dollar", auctioneers said Wednesday.

Only 300 of the coins survive and Belinda Downie, managing director of Melbourne dealer Coinworks, said the one that sold this week was the finest example.

Chinese couples are flocking to divorce to evade a new tax on home sales after the government cracked down on property speculation, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported Wednesday.

China's central government last Friday issued rules to rein in house prices, including a nationwide capital gains tax of 20 percent on profits owners make from selling residential property.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has an addition to its famous gem collection: It is a butterfly brooch made of 2,300 gems.

The "Royal Butterfly Brooch" was created in 2009 by Taiwanese jewelry artist Cindy Chao. She is donating the piece to the museum, making it the first Taiwanese-designed item in the National Gem Collection. It goes on display Wednesday.

Nearby the big city rumbles, but one feels almost transported to a quiet forest village when standing amid a colony of Finnish wooden houses in Warsaw's government district.

The homes, erected as temporary housing in the destroyed capital just after World War II, have dwindled over the years from 90 to about 25. Now the surviving structures have become a point of contention between their inhabitants and a city government keen on tearing them down to make way for new developments.

Hip-hop artists including rappers Nas and Somalia-born K'naan will take center stage in an unexpected place next year: as part of next season at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

The center announced Tuesday that its 2013-2014 season would include the week long festival "One Mic: Hip-Hop Culture Worldwide." It will also feature an international theater festival featuring works from at least 10 different nations and new American works in theater, opera and music.

The share of women in the world's parliaments has risen to a new high topping 20 percent, with quotas the driving the surge, the International Parliamentary Union said Tuesday.

"Since parliaments exist, this is the first time in history that there's been one woman for every four men," said Anders Johnsson, head of the Geneva-based IPU, which groups 162 national legislatures.

His grandfather ran a Gulag prison camp, but he is "not ashamed", the descendant of a Stalin official tells the hushed audience to whom he is narrating his relative's life.

Sixty years after Joseph Stalin's death, descendants of officials who were part of the dictator's regime testify in a theatrical show staged at a Moscow human rights museum.

UNESCO is ready to send experts to Mali to assess damage to cultural treasures in the troubled north as soon as security conditions allow, its director general said Monday.

Irina Bokova, on a visit to U.N. headquarters in New York, told journalists UNESCO's action plan for Mali, still was not fully funded.

Dutch police on Monday arrested a young Romanian woman in Rotterdam on suspicion of helping get a haul of masterpieces stolen from the city's Kunsthal museum out of the country, police said on Monday.

"Detectives investigating the art heist at the Kunsthal on Monday afternoon arrested a 19-year-old Romanian woman who is suspected of being involved in the handling of the seven stolen paintings," Rotterdam police said in a statement.

A property developer in Germany at the center of running protests over part of the once-detested Berlin Wall being knocked down said on Monday that the dismantling had been temporarily halted.

While dozens of protestors again gathered at the Wall's longest surviving stretch, Maik Uwe Hinkel, the head of the company Living Bauhaus, said in a German newspaper that he was open to compromise.