A bomb disposal squad was sent to a Hong Kong hiking trail Friday after a walker found an unexploded World War II-era device near a youth hostel, police said.

Officers evacuated 22 people from the hostel and cordoned off the area after the expatriate hiker discovered the Japanese artillery shell on Mount Davis at the western edge of the Hong Kong island, a police spokeswoman said.

A fire has razed a 250-year-old wooden temple in Japan, police said Friday, at a site that has been a place of worship since the 13th Century.

Tokumanji temple, which sits deep in the mountains of Nagano prefecture was destroyed by the fire, which started late Thursday night, police said.

Hundreds of descendants and supporters of Ned Kelly bade farewell to the infamous Australian bushranger at a requiem mass on Friday, some 132 years after he was executed for killing three policemen.

His memory still divides the nation, with some believing he was a cold-blooded killer, while others see him as a folk hero and symbol of Irish-Australian defiance against British colonial authorities.

A trove of about 4,300 rare vintage advertising posters that were seized and feared to have been destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 will go to auction in New York on Friday.

The collection, which originally belonged to Hans Sachs, a Jewish dentist in Berlin, has been recovered by his son Peter and will be sold at Guernsey's Auction House.

A German court on Wednesday fined a renegade British bishop 1,800 euros ($2,400) for denying key facts about the Holocaust.

The district court in the southern city of Regensburg convicted Bishop Richard Williamson of incitement to hatred after he gave an interview to Swedish television disputing the existence of Nazi gas chambers to kill Jews.

Jews of European origin are a mix of ancestries, with many hailing from tribes in the Caucasus who converted to Judaism and created an empire that lasted half a millennium, according to a gene study published on Thursday.

The investigation, its author says, should settle a debate that has been roiling for more than two centuries.

An amateur prospector has made the find of a lifetime in southern Australia, unearthing a gold nugget weighing about five kilograms (12 pounds) just outside the town of Ballarat, reports said Thursday.

The Y-shaped deposit was found with a hand-held metal detector at a depth of a little over 60 centimeters (24 inches), according to a video of the find posted on YouTube.

The Spanish city of Granada plans to name a square after the late British punk star Joe Strummer who sang of the town in one of his band The Clash's classic tunes, an official said Wednesday.

The driving rock anthem "Spanish Bombs" on the band's 1979 album "London Calling" recalled the Spanish civil war and Granada's favorite son, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, executed there by nationalist soldiers in 1936.

Pope Benedict XVI's dashing personal secretary Georg Gaenswein has made the front page of the Italian edition of Vanity Fair, under the headline "being beautiful is not a sin."

"The George Clooney of St. Peter's is the Vatican's number two, following his ordination as bishop," says the magazine, which goes on sale on Thursday and charts Gaenswein's rise up the Holy See hierarchy.

Dozens of apartment towers sprouting up illicitly in an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem are creating a fraught new dynamic in the struggle for control of the sacred city at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Kufr Aqab is one of several Arab areas within Jerusalem's municipal borders that have been separated from the city by the meandering barrier Israel has built to wall off the West Bank.