Finland's capital is aglow with colorful lights and lasers piercing the black winter skies and lighting up downtown buildings providing a much-needed burst of illumination during the darkest days of the year.

Light and sound installations at the Helsinki Lux Festival brought crowds at the city landmarks joined by lanterns hanging in trees along a path of light bordering the frozen Baltic Sea through parks and on city sidewalks, where the shortest period of daylight in midwinter is about five hours long.

A painting by Henri Matisse has been recovered a quarter century after it was stolen from a Swedish museum by a sledgehammer-wielding thief.

The Art Loss Register, which tracks stolen, missing and looted art, says "Le Jardin" was found when a British dealer checked the picture against the group's database before selling it.

Rights groups urged the Indonesian government Tuesday to block a proposed law banning women from sitting astride motorcycles in deeply Islamic Aceh province, where the position is deemed "improper".

The mayor of Lhokseumawe city in Aceh, where sharia law is enforced, circulated a letter Monday explaining the obligation for women to sit side-saddle was "to avoid immoral acts".

Enrique Meneses, the Spanish journalist who scored a historic scoop photographing Fidel Castro and his rebels in the Cuban mountains during their revolution, has died aged 83, his friends said Monday.

Meneses's photographs of bearded Castro and Che Guevara in the Sierra Maestra -- where he camped with them for four months in 1957-1958 -- made the cover of Paris Match magazine and became images of reference for the uprising.

Residents of a small Hungarian town failed to stop a park from taking on the name of the country's Nazi-allied wartime leader, after too few voters turned out for a Sunday referendum.

The park in Gyomro, on the outskirts of Budapest, was named after Miklos Horthy last year following a motion by the far-right nationalist Jobbik party, the third-largest in parliament.

Painted on scraps of clothing with carved soap, cigarette lighters and even syringes, Htein Lin's artworks were his lifeline during years in Myanmar jails -- and the spark for an extraordinary love story.

"These paintings were really dangerous and also precious," said the 46-year-old former student protest leader, who produced more than 200 works during his six-and-a-half years in jail under the junta.

South Korea's low birth rate means the size of its youth population -- those aged between nine and 24 -- will be slashed in half by 2060, a government report warned Monday.

The number of young people peaked at 14 million in 1980, accounting for 36.8 percent of the whole population, census data by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family showed.

The Church of England has dropped its opposition to gay clergymen in civil partnerships becoming bishops, provided the men concerned promise to remain celibate, it confirmed on Friday.

The announcement by the Church's House of Bishops is likely to reignite a row which has split England's state Church since 2003, when gay cleric Jeffrey John was forced to withdraw as bishop of Reading under pressure from traditionalists.

Poland's chief rabbi on Friday voiced outrage over a statue of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler kneeling at a Holocaust site in Warsaw, part of an installation by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.

"When it comes to showing the figure of Hitler, we have an extra special responsibility to be sensitive to those who suffered because of what Hitler created, to Holocaust survivors, to non-Jewish survivors, to those who didn't survive," Rabbi Michael Schudrich told Agence France Presse.

The number of visitors to the World War II Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp soared to a record 1.43 million in 2012, the museum at the site in southern Poland said Friday.

"This is a record in the 65-year history of this museum. We've received over a million visitors each year over the last six years," it said in a statement published on its website.