Hordes of trekkers flocked to Mount Fuji Monday at the start of a two-month climbing season, after it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in recognition of its status as a symbol of Japan.

Hundreds of hikers began their ascent of the 3,776-metre (12,389-feet) peak before dawn in a bid to stand at the summit to watch the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean.

The centuries-old skull of a white man found in Australia is raising questions about whether Captain James Cook really was the first European to land on the country's east coast.

The skull was found in northern New South Wales in late 2011, and police initially prepared themselves for a gruesome murder investigation.

French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault on Friday handed back to China two rare bronzes plundered from Beijing's Old Summer Palace during the Second Opium War in 1860.

The bronzes of two animal heads were the subject of controversy in 2009, when they were put up for auction at Christie's by Pierre Berge, the partner of late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent.

Polish and Peruvian archaeologists have discovered a royal burial chamber with 60 mummies and some 1,200 gold, silver and ceramic objects from over 1,000 years ago in Peru.

The mummies -- including three princesses -- and other items date back to a pre-Inca culture called the Wari, who peaked between the seventh and 11th centuries, researchers said.

China denied changing its stance on exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Saturday, after reports said Beijing had relaxed its policies of publicly denouncing him and banning worship of his image.

"Our policy towards the Dalai Lama is clear and consistent, and has not changed," China's state bureau of religious affairs said in a fax sent to Agence France Presse.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum marks the 30th anniversary of its photography collection Friday with a major exhibition of 113 works that reflect how the medium has evolved.

"A Democracy of Images" includes pictures by Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, Annie Leibovitz, Edward Weston and Gerry Winogrand, among many others.

When April Burton explains the intricacies of French grammar to her American classroom, the students are at home, in front of their computer or smartphone.

As for the homework, they will do it the following day, at school, thanks to the "flipped" classrooms approach made possible thanks to new technologies that are transforming education.

The singing rises through the early-morning cool which still covers the esplanade in front of the Western Wall, the holiest site at which Jews can pray.

A mother and daughter pray entwined. A young woman clutches a tiny infant of just a few months to her chest. Another almost disappears under a prayer shawl embroidered with red flowers as if to protect herself from the invective of the ultra-Orthodox worshippers on the other side of the police barrier separating them from the section of the plaza reserved for women.

More than two million Tibetans in China have been forced to change homes or relocate in a government-sponsored program that is damaging their traditional culture and rural lifestyle, a human rights monitoring group said.

"The scale and speed at which the Tibetan rural population is being remodeled by mass rehousing and relocation policies are unprecedented in the post-Mao era," Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, said in a release accompanying the report.

A long-awaited international treaty that would give hundreds of millions of blind and visually impaired people better access to books is to be signed Thursday, according to the organizers of a conference in Morocco.

Hundreds of delegates from the World Intellectual Property Organization's 186 member countries gathered in the central city of Marrakesh to finalize the treaty seeking to overcome the restrictions to published material that copyright laws impose on the blind.