A shiny new Islamic art museum and cultural center will open in Toronto next week, becoming the first of its kind in North America.

Bankrolled by Prince Karim Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of Ismaili Muslims, the facility will feature more than 1,000 artifacts -- including rare scriptures of the Quran from the 7th and 8th centuries‎.

When workers began renovating Murad Khane district, a jewel of Old Kabul that breaks up the city's otherwise bland facade of concrete high-rises and blast-walls, it was hidden under piles of garbage.

Now the teeming quarter is home to bustling bazaars, a revitalized calligraphy and woodwork school and a courtyard that won a UNESCO conservation award last year.

British painter JMW Turner is the star of London's cultural scene again with a major exhibition that opened Wednesday, a rare auction of his works and an upcoming biopic.

The exhibition "Late Turner: Painting Set Free" at Tate Britain is the first major show dedicated to the last productive and creatively experimental years of the painter's life between his 60th birthday in 1835 and his death in 1851.

A vast complex of monuments surrounding Britain's prehistoric Stonehenge site has been revealed using hi-tech underground scanning, archaeologists said Wednesday.

The mysterious circle of standing stones, on Salisbury Plain in southwest England, is one of the most iconic ancient sites in Europe and was long thought to stand alone.

Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction and fantasy writer widely celebrated as a visionary and compelling storyteller, is receiving an honorary National Book Award.

The National Book Foundation, which presents the awards, announced Tuesday that Le Guin was receiving the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Previous winners include Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer and Elmore Leonard. Le Guin, 84, is known for such novels as "The Left Hand of Darkness" and "The Farthest Shore," which in 1973 won the National Book Award for young people's literature.

Canada has located the remains of one of two British explorer ships lost in the Arctic in 1846, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Tuesday, hailing the find as historic.

South America's Guarani people played a football-like game two centuries before the modern sport emerged, the Paraguayan government says in a new documentary based on Jesuit texts.

Teenagers under 17 who use cannabis daily are 60 percent less likely to complete high school or get a degree than peers who have never taken the drug, researchers said on Wednesday. 

France's summer is fast becoming a memory, and so is one of its iconic beach sights: the topless woman.

As few as 2 percent of French women under 35 now say they want to bare their breasts, according to an Elle magazine poll this summer. It's a far cry from the once-ubiquitous scenes of semi-nudity on the French Riviera, epitomized by 1960s blond bombshell Brigitte Bardot.

Emperor Hirohito, the demi-god at the apex of the Japanese state when it waged bloody war across Asia, cautioned against conflict but celebrated military success, according to the long-awaited official history of his reign, released Tuesday.