Australian novelist Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for his book "The Narrow Road to the Deep North", inspired by his father's experience as a prisoner of war.
The book tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, a surgeon imprisoned in a Japanese work camp on the Thailand-Burma railway.
Full Story
More than 82 million people in China still live on less than about $1 a day, a senior official said, despite a decades-long boom that made it the world's second-largest economy.
China's official poverty standard is an annual income of 2,300 yuan ($375), close to the long-used benchmark of $1 a day.
Full Story
Tugging ropes and bellowing chants, five men hoist from the water a huge spidery frame gripping a web of fishing net -- a centuries-old custom on the southern Indian coast.
Two of the team bound down a rickety platform to scoop up the catch, which is once again meagre: a few silvery fish tangled in weed and a scuttling small crab.
Full Story
An extraordinary exhibition into the later works of Rembrandt opened at the National Gallery in London on Wednesday, revealing the energy, innovation and empathy of the Dutch master right up to his death.
Featuring about 40 paintings, 20 drawings and 30 prints loaned from collections around the world, "Rembrandt: The Late Works" is the first in-depth exploration into the final stage of the artist's career.
Full Story
Austria's interior ministry is appealing to other ministries to take over Hitler's birthplace in Braunau, amid a years-long debate over what should become of the building.
The interior ministry has rented the large pale yellow house where the future Nazi leader was born since 1972 and variously sublet it to a technical institute and an aid organization.
Full Story
A Chinese painter's son who sued his 95-year-old mother over the estimated $300 million artistic treasure trove left by his father has lost the case, state-run media reported Tuesday.
The legal action brought by Xu Huayi is reminiscent of high-profile trust fund disputes in the West, and the family feud is a far cry from long-held Chinese ideals of filial piety.
Full Story
Growing up in California in the 1950s, Merilyn Phillips Hodgson lived in awe of her big brother, a strapping young American adventurer on the trail of the biblical Queen of Sheba.
Wendell Phillips was still in his mid-20s when he spearheaded his own expedition into the desert of what is today Yemen, searching its shifting sands for relics of a civilization that thrived 2,500 years before.
Full Story
A British metal-detecting enthusiast has unearthed the most significant Viking treasure hoard ever found in Scotland, shedding light on the warriors' links with the rest of Europe.
Officials said on Monday that the trove includes more than 100 objects dating from the ninth and 10th centuries and will help in understanding the history of medieval Scotland and updating the image of Vikings as bloodthirsty axemen.
Full Story
Cambodian authorities say they are hunting a New Zealand tourist who allegedly destroyed a statue while illegally staying overnight at the country's famed Angkor Wat temple complex.
Restoration workers found the woman, who has not been named, at the 12th-century Bayon temple on Friday morning -- one of the most recognizable temples at the sprawling heritage site.
Full Story
The gate opens and the bull charges into the arena, two cowboys on horseback in hot pursuit.
One flanks him, the other tries to grab him by the tail to drag him at a gallop and pull him to the ground.
Full Story


