American television audiences will see something unique this week — filmed live in the streets and palaces of an Italian city: Verdi's "Rigoletto" with Placido Domingo, singing right where the story is set.

When the plot says "midnight" — he's there exactly at midnight, singing from the city of Mantua for TV.

Israel has given final approval to build a museum of tolerance over a centuries-old Muslim graveyard in the Jewish western half of Jerusalem.

Interior Ministry spokeswoman Efrat Orbach said Wednesday that a building permit was issued for the project and construction can begin immediately.

Forest groups on Wednesday welcomed an Indonesian commitment to protect the rights of indigenous people who have long complained that their land is being stolen in the name of conservation schemes.

With billions of dollars in foreign aid and carbon offsets potentially on the table, tribal groups have accused internationally backed efforts to tackle deforestation of pushing them off their ancestral land.

The mist lifts from the mountains of Kenya's fabled Rift Valley, better known for its flamingoes and zebras than its wine, as women weave in and out with baskets of grapes on their heads.

It is grape picking time at Kenya's only commercial vineyard.

A rediscovered painting by Italian master Leonardo da Vinci estimated to be worth $200 million (142 million Euros) will go on display in London later this year, the National Gallery announced.

"Salvator Mundi", which was painted around 1500, depicts a figure of Christ holding an orb and will be shown as part of the gallery's larger exhibition on the Renaissance master due to open in November.

A trove of Jewish books and other materials, rescued from a sewage-filled Baghdad basement during the 2003 invasion, is now caught up in a tug-of-war between the United States and Iraq.

Ranging from a medieval religious book to children's Hebrew primers, from photos to Torah cases, the collection is testimony to a once vibrant Jewish community in Baghdad. Their present-day context is the relationship, fraught with distrust, between postwar Iraq and its Jewish diaspora.

Room 217 in the Gran Hotel La Perla, swankiest hotel in northern Spain's bull-running city Pamplona, has barely changed since Ernest Hemingway last slept here.

There are a few alterations the American writer might have abhorred -- a plasma television, air conditioning, and a price of up to 1,800 euros ($2,500) a night during the San Fermin festival, which runs to July 14.

Mexican archaeologists have found two 1,300-year-old limestone sculptures of captured Mayan warriors that they say could shed light on the alliances and wars among Mayan cities during the civilization's twilight.

The life-size, elaborate sculptures of two warriors sitting cross-legged with hands tied behind their backs were found in May in the archaeological site of Tonina in southern Chiapas state along with two stone ballgame scoreboards.

Egyptian officials say archaeologists have unearthed the first basilica erected in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria.

Antiquities authorities say the basilica is dated to the Roman era and was built on the ruins of a temple from the Ptolemaic reign that ended with the death of Cleopatra.

At the remains of an ancient metropolis in southern Israel, archaeologists are piecing together the history of a people remembered chiefly as the bad guys of the Hebrew Bible.

The city of Gath, where the annual digging season began this week, is helping scholars paint a more nuanced portrait of the Philistines, who appear in the biblical story as the perennial enemies of the Israelites.