After Michelangelo and Raphael, the Vatican's latest official painter is something of an unusual choice -- an ebullient Russian woman with a pet owl who is a regular at the court of cardinals and popes.

An Orthodox believer in the heart of Roman Catholicism, Natalia Tsarkova paints her classical-style portraits in a flat filled with Vatican memorabilia by the walls of the Holy See.

As Giglio marks the first anniversary of the Costa Concordia disaster Sunday, locals haunted by the memories of that night say they want rid of the ghostly shipwreck which has scarred the island and their lives.

"The thing that really stayed with me was the children's eyes," said Mario Pellegrini, a hotel owner and deputy mayor on the Tuscan island of 1,500 residents, who played a key role in the rescue that night.

Hundreds of thousands of mostly barefoot Roman Catholic devotees joined a raucous procession through the streets of the Philippine capital Wednesday in an annual ritual to demonstrate faith and seek miracle cures for illnesses and a good life.

Police estimated about 500,000 people left from the parade grounds of Manila's Rizal Park for the daylong march that sees a statue of Jesus Christ pulled through the city's central district.

A rare photo showing the mushroom cloud from the Hiroshima atomic bombing in two distinct parts, one above the other, has been discovered in the city, a museum curator said Wednesday.

The black-and-white picture is believed to have been taken about half-an-hour after the bombing on August 6, 1945, around 10 kilometers (six miles) east of the hypocentre.

The United States on Tuesday returned to Italy a ceramic water vase from the sixth century BC that had been sold to an Ohio museum in 1982 by art dealers using falsified documents.

In a statement, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) said the rare Estruscan black-figure kalpis, valued at $665,000, was handed back to Italian officials following a ceremony at the Toledo Museum of Art.

In the heart of Syria's rebel territory, away from the blasts and bullets of the frontlines, another struggle is playing out: one for a new justice system that could shape the future face of the country should the regime fall.

The struggle is between ex-regime judges and Islamic jihadists, and at stake is whether the courts apply a modified version of existing Syrian law, or switch to strict sharia law.

A British-led excavation team hunting for dozens of rare Spitfires in Myanmar said Wednesday they were confident about recovering the World War II-era planes after finding a crate buried in the ground.

Project leader David Cundall, who has compared the rumored hoard to the 1922 discovery of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb, said a box found in the Kachin state capital Myitkyina appeared to contain man-made objects.

Polish prosecutors have launched an investigation into a Swedish artist's claims he used the ashes of Holocaust victims in his artwork, an official said Tuesday.

The artist, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, claims he stole ashes from a crematorium at Nazi Germany's Majdanek concentration camp in Poland in 1989 then used them in one of his paintings by mixing them with water.

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.