Queen Elizabeth II marked the 60th anniversary of her coronation on Tuesday with a service at Westminster Abbey filled with references to the rainy day in 1953 when she was crowned.

More than 2,000 guests crammed into the abbey for the service, attended by all the senior members of the royal family including Prince William and his heavily pregnant wife Catherine.

Two centuries after the birth of Richard Wagner, audiences in Russia are beginning to overcome decades of suspicion shadowed by the horror of World War II and embrace the music of the great German composer.

The Novaya Opera (New Opera) in the Russian capital scored a major triumph with a new production of Wagner's blazingly intense opera of doomed love "Tristan and Isolde" that was astonishingly the Moscow premiere of one of the cornerstones of Western music.

More than one third of U.S. marriages begin with online dating, and those couples may be slightly happier than couples who meet through other means, a U.S. study out Monday found.

Online dating has ballooned into a billion-dollar industry and the Internet "may be altering the dynamics and outcome of marriage itself," said the study by U.S. researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The earliest evidence of wine in France suggests that it came from Italy, and that it was mixed with basil, thyme and other herbs, according to research published on Monday.

This early wine may have been used as medicine, and likely was imbibed by the wealthy and powerful before eventually becoming a popular beverage enjoyed by the masses, researchers said.

A huge trove of photographs taken over half a century by Switzerland's Rene Burri, known for his iconic portrait of cigar-smoking revolutionary Che Guevara, is to be donated to a museum in his homeland, officials said Monday.

The Lausanne-based Elysee Museum, a temple for photography buffs from around the globe, said it would become the long-term home for an estimated 30,000 of Burri's works.

Populist politician Pauline Hanson, who once warned Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asians, said Monday she would run in this year's national election to protect "the Australian way of life".

Describing herself as "the redhead you can trust" -- seen as a reference to flame haired Prime Minister Julia Gillard -- she told reporters Australians were fed up with "selfish, dysfunctional and egotistical" political parties.

More than a million people took to Sao Paulo's streets Sunday for a massive Gay Pride parade, aiming to end discrimination and support same-sex marriage rights in Brazil.

Under rainy skies and cold that did not dampen many spirits, marchers waved banners like "Never going back in the closet" in the financial and industrial hub of this majority Roman Catholic country of about 196 million.

Worried its gastronomic reputation is being damaged by substandard eateries, France is considering banning establishments from calling themselves restaurants if meals are not made from scratch by in-house chefs.

The move, backed by the Synhorcat restaurant union and a group of lawmakers, aims to crack down on the proliferation of restaurants serving boil-in-a-bag or microwaved ready meals as restaurant-quality cuisine.

Muslims outside the United States who use the Internet are more likely to have a favorable opinion of Western popular culture than those who don't go online, the Pew Research Center said Friday.

Crunching the numbers of its recent wide-ranging survey of Muslims in 39 countries, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found a median of 18 percent of respondents use the Internet at home, work or school.

As Japan's population declines, intolerance of children and the noise they make is increasing in a society getting less accustomed to hearing them, childcare experts say.

In a nation where convenience stores blare electronic greetings and political candidates shout through high-volume megaphones at train stations, day care centers are putting up sound barriers to muffle the din that toddlers make and sports clubs are restricting the times that youngsters can play outside to avoid upsetting the neighbors.