A Hungarian festival for those claiming kinship with the ancient nomadic Huns wound down Sunday after drawing tens of thousands of distant cousins from across Asia and the Caucasus.

Police said some 80,000 people descended on the village of Bugac for three days of concerts, horse racing, folk dances, archery and other activities at the "Kurultaj" festival, a word of Turkish origin meaning "tribal meeting".

Russian Cossacks on horseback Sunday kicked off a two-month-long friendly march on Paris to mark the bicentenary of a key battle Russia fought against Napoleon that led to an eventual French defeat.

The commemorative horse trek spanning some 2,500 kilometers (1,560 miles) and estimated to cost $2.5 million (2.0 million euros) is supported by the Russian government and comes amid a drive to boost Russia's global standing.

"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.