La Scala opera house in Milan on Friday celebrated the start of its 2012/2013 season with Richard Wagner's "Lohengrin" -- a disputed choice ahead of the bicentenaries of the famous German composer and his Italian rival Giuseppe Verdi.

The premiere coincides with the Feast of Saint Ambrose, the patron saint of Italy's commercial capital, and the country's economic and political elites were out in force for the gala.

Mo Yan was assailed Saturday in the Chinese dissident community as a "prostitute" after his Nobel lecture, which was acclaimed in the communist state's media.

In the Nobel lecture in Stockholm on Friday, Mo, the vice-chairman of the government-backed China Writers' Association, took a swipe at his critics, saying their target "had nothing to do" with him, and urged them to read his books.

French and Italian archaeologists have found the remains of a grain port that played a critical role in the rise of ancient Rome, France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) said on Thursday.

Cores drilled at a location at the mouth of the River Tiber have revealed the site of a port whose existence has been sought for centuries, it said in a press release.

The newly-opened Ropac Gallery, housed in a refurbished early 20th-century boiler works, symbolizes the transformation under way in Pantin and other gritty, working class suburbs to the north and east of Paris.

Paris is a compact city and as it deals with increasing demands on space, many residents and businesses are looking to the surrounding suburbs, which are home to the bulk of the 12 million people in the French capital's agglomeration.

Britain will announce plans next week to allow gay marriages in churches and other religious buildings, officials said Friday, although Prime Minister David Cameron insisted no faith group would be forced to hold them.

Culture Secretary Maria Miller will unveil ministers' responses to a consultation earlier this year, which will propose that religious organizations should be able to 'opt-in' to hold same-sex weddings, according to a government source.

Two French Muslim groups have filed a lawsuit for inciting racial hatred and slander against a French satirical weekly that published cartoons of a naked Prophet Mohammed, the paper's lawyer said Friday.

Charlie Hebdo published the cartoons in September as often violent -- and sometimes deadly -- protests were taking place in several countries over a low-budget film made in the United States that insults the prophet.

Ray Emory could not accept that more than one quarter of the 2,400 Americans who died at Pearl Harbor were buried, unidentified, in a volcanic crater.

And so he set out to restore names to the dead.

A US official is taking a novel approach to diplomacy in Pakistan -- singing in a local language to build bridges in one of the world's most dangerous countries, where anti-Americanism runs rampant.

Shayla Cram, a public diplomacy officer assigned to Peshawar, the gateway to al-Qaida and Taliban strongholds in the northwestern tribal belt, has not only learnt Pashto but has penned her own Pashto-style song.

North Korea has put Kim Jong-Il's yacht in the family mausoleum and had to build a railway to get it there, a report said Friday as Pyongyang prepares to mark one year since the late leader's death.

The reclusive state has been putting together a collection of some of Kim's possessions at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang, which houses the preserved body of his father, Kim Il-Sung, Yonhap news agency said.

An Egyptian granite sculpture of a sphinx that risked ending up on the black market for antiquities is destined instead for a Rome museum.

Italian Tax Police Maj. Massimo Rossi says the sphinx, perhaps as old as the 4th century B.C., was found on the outskirts of Rome last week. It was in a box hidden in a greenhouse near an ancient Etruscan necropolis.