More than 4,000 years ago, Dilmun merchants traveled from Mesopotamia to the Indus River, titans of trade and culture before rise of the empires of the Persians or the Ottomans

Over a millennia, the civilization that Dilmun created on the back of trading in pearls, copper and dates as far as South Asia faded into the encroaching sands. It wasn't until an excavation by Danish archaeologists in the 1950s that its past was rediscovered.

Scholars, campaigners and lawyers can for the first time readily access more than 2,200 documents from a largely unknown archive housed at the United Nations that documents thousands of cases against accused World War II criminals in Europe and Asia.

The unrestricted records of the United Nations War Crimes Commission were put online in early July by the International Criminal Court after an agreement with the U.N., a move spurred by British academic Dan Plesch, who has been leading the push for greater access to the archive. The documents relate to more than 10,000 cases.

The portrait of Nelson Mandela is -- like the man himself -- forged from violence and endurance, created as the artist pounded the wall 27,000 times with a boxing glove which bore the Chinese character for "freedom".

The resulting Mandela -- a boxer and leader of armed struggle jailed for 27 years before becoming South Africa's president and world-renowned peacemaker -- smiles softly with twinkling eyes and a gentle, knowing gaze.

In Soviet days, people queued here to buy Romanian boots or East German bras, but Moscow's vast GUM shopping arcade, which turns 120 this year, is now a luxury emporium that plays on Soviet nostalgia.

The official 120th birthday celebrations will take place in several months at the Gosudarstvenny Universalny Magazin (GUM), or State Universal Store, whose three cream-walled arcades topped with a 16,000-square meter (172,220-square feet) glass roof opened opposite the Kremlin in the Tsarist era on December 2, 1893.

An Australian mining firm was convicted Friday of desecrating a sacred outback Aboriginal site in a landmark ruling protecting the beliefs of the beleaguered minority in the country.

OM (Manganese) Limited, an Australian subsidiary of Singapore-based OM Holdings Limited, was fined Aus$150,000 (U.S.$133,600) for damaging the spiritual significance of an Aboriginal rock site at Bootu Creek, north of remote Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory.

The British government has stepped in to stop singer Kelly Clarkson from taking a ring once owned by author Jane Austen out of the country.

The "American Idol" winner bought the gold and turquoise ring at auction last year for just over 150,000 pounds ($228,000).

Israeli President Shimon Peres on Thursday honored thousands of Lithuanian Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust, during a visit to a memorial site close to his birthplace.

With his Lithuanian counterpart, Peres laid wreaths at the memorial located in the outskirts of the Baltic state's capital Vilnius in tribute to the 70,000 Jews killed there during World War II.

Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko says a new law cracking down on gay rights activism will be enforced during the 2014 Olympics in Sochi.

Mutko's statement on Thursday follows assurances from the International Olympic Committee that neither athletes nor visitors to the games would be subject to discrimination under the law.

The man who runs Germany's biggest opera house says a chance encounter with an American colleague brought home to him just how fortunate he is.

Nikolaus Bachler, intendant of the Bavarian State Opera, recalled staying at a hotel in Verona, Italy, and finding that the head of a U.S. opera company was also a guest there.

Georgia on Tuesday said a statue of Joseph Stalin would be put up outside the museum commemorating the Soviet dictator in his hometown of Gori, three years after it was torn down from its plinth in the town center.

A spokeswoman for Georgia's culture ministry said that Gori town council had taken the decision to resurrect the controversial bronze statue, which was dismantled under cover of darkness in 2010.