The elderly residents of one Chinese county have endured invasion, civil war and famine, and many live in unheated concrete shacks on only a few dollars a day. But they are apparently among the longest-living people on earth.

Chengmai, a string of villages dotted with orange plantations in the tropical island province of Hainan, claims more than 200 residents aged over 100 out of a population of 560,000 -- one of the highest ratios in the world.

Around 65,000 people have queued for hours in Saint Petersburg to see a religious relic brought from Greece, officials said Saturday, in the latest sign of the Russian Orthodox Church's influence in post-Soviet Russia.

The cross of Saint Andrew -- said to be a relic of the X-shaped cross on which Andrew the Apostle was crucified -- was placed in Saint Petersburg's Kazan Cathedral on Thursday after arriving from its historic home in Patras in Greece.

Swiss authorities said Friday they had returned a pre-Columbian ceramic jug to Peru after police caught someone trying to sell it over the Internet.

The Geneva public prosecutor's office said it had returned the small, two-handled jug dating from the pre-Columbian Chancay period between the 12th and 15th centuries to the Peruvian embassy in Bern.

"My Education" (Viking) by Susan Choi

Our first glimpse of Regina Gottlieb is as a graduate student in her first days at a prestigious university. Somewhat naïve and more than a little intimidated by the sea of bright lights around her, Regina is drawn to a notorious and notoriously handsome English professor whose reputation has been both burnished and tarnished by rumors of sexual misbehavior.

Fierce debate has erupted among experts in China over the discovery of 5,000-year-old inscriptions that some believe represent the earliest record of Chinese characters.

Pottery pieces and stone vessels unearthed at the Zhuangqiaofen archaeological site in the eastern province of Zhejiang push "the origin of the written language back 1,000 years", the state-run Global Times newspaper reported.

The Qatari prince who owns the Hotel Lambert in Paris vowed Thursday to restore the landmark mansion to its original grandeur after it suffered severe damage in a fire.

Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalifa Al Thani said he was determined to follow through with the restoration of the mansion after the fire on Wednesday at the 17th-century townhouse on Ile Saint-Louis overlooking the Seine.

Some arrived in Porsches or BMWs, which were whisked away by valet parking attendants. The hotel lobby was awash with the celebrated and powerful including A-list actors, well-known artists and captains of commerce.

For one glimmering moment late last month, the Iranian capital was the talk of the world's art market after 80 works sold for $2 million, astonishing a country whose economy is battered by Western sanctions but still has pockets of wealth looking for investment havens for their money.

The thugs ordered Kyaw not to look as they killed his classmates, but the terrified teenager still caught glimpses of the merciless beatings as a wave of anti-Muslim killing engulfed his school town in central Myanmar, leaving dozens dead.

"They used steel chains, sticks and knives... there were hundreds of people. They beat anyone who tried to look at them," the 16-year-old told Agence France Presse.

An original Apple computer from 1976 has sold at auction for nearly $388,000.

Known as the Apple 1, it was one of the first Apple computers ever built.

St Mark's Square in Venice on Wednesday was the spectacular backdrop to a tragic opera in the first open-air performance in 43 years by the famous La Fenice theatre -- a new must on the global culture calendar.

La Fenice is staging Italian maestro Giuseppe Verdi's interpretation of Shakespeare's "Othello, the Moor of Venice" -- with South Korea's Myung-Whun Chung conducting La Fenice's orchestra and choir.