"It's there," says an archaeologist pointing to the ground, where fragments of a Buddha statue from the ancient Gandhara civilization have been covered up to stop them being stolen or vandalized.

Just months before the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, the Taliban regime shocked the world by destroying two giant, 1,500-year-old Buddhas in the rocky Bamiyan valley, branding them un-Islamic.

He may not be able to resuscitate Hong Kong's long-dead incense trade but entrepreneur Chan Koon-wing is at least hoping to save the tree that gave the city its name centuries ago.

Chan returned to the southern Chinese city from his adopted home in Northern Ireland four years ago to revive his late grandfather's incense-tree plantation in the northern village of Shing Ping, near the border with the mainland.

Former East German strongman Erich Honecker religiously knocked back pure lemon juice every morning to ward off colds, his long-serving butler reveals in a new book.

The notoriously dour Honecker, who ran communist East Germany from 1976 until just before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, was very attentive to his health, Lothar Herzog says in "Honecker Privat" (The Private Honecker).

Pyotr Fomenko, one of Russia's most celebrated directors known for his inventive adaptation of the classics, has died in Moscow at the age of 80, city officials said on Thursday.

"Pyotr Fomenko died today," a spokeswoman for Moscow's culture department told Agence France Presse.

Hundreds of patients at Argentina's biggest mental hospital are turning fine arts training into real ability as painters, actors and musicians, are getting a fuller sense of self along the way.

"Art really can be a tool for change in society. And you can see its effects, because art can heal people," said Mirtha Otazua, a psychologist and coordinator of an acting workshop at Jose Tiburcio Borda Mental Hospital.

Baghdad was once the capital of an empire and the center of the Islamic world, but at 1,250 years old, the Iraqi city is a far cry from its past glories after being ravaged by years of war and sanctions.

Construction of the city on the bank of the Tigris River began in July 762 AD under Abbasid Caliph Abu Jaafar al-Mansur, and it has since played a pivotal role in Arab and Islamic civilizations.

Three independent Egyptian newspapers ran white boxes on Thursday in the space where their editorials are usually found in protest at what they say is a bid by the Muslim Brotherhood to control the media.

"The space is white to protest against attempts by the Brotherhood to impose its control over the press and media belonging to the Egyptian people," wrote al-Watan which, along with al-Masry al-Youm and al-Tahrir, did not publish editorials.

The discovery of more than 1,200 photographs of former prisoners at a notorious Khmer Rouge torture jail has raised hopes that more Cambodians could learn their relatives' fate, researchers said Thursday.

The collection of passport-sized images contains previously unseen portraits of inmates held at S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-CAM), which researches atrocities committed by the hardline communist regime in the late 1970s.

Today the Mouraria, a maze of narrow alleys, cobblestone squares and decrepit buildings strung with washing at the heart of Lisbon, is known more for drugs and prostitution than as a tourist stop.

But the neighborhood, one of the capital's oldest, is also where Portugal's melancholy national song style, the fado, was born in the 19th century -- a bit of history that locals want to tap in a district long neglected by city hall where even Lisbonites rarely venture.

Brazil on Friday marks the centennial of the birth of Jorge Amado, its most acclaimed modern writer, whose ribald tales of urban life in his native Bahia state have been translated into 49 languages.

The author, who died 11 years ago, left behind an extensive body of works that celebrate life's sensual pleasures and explore the theme of racial mixing in Bahia, a northeastern state with a large Afro-Brazilian population.