The largest Titanic visitor attraction in the world opened in the ship's Belfast birthplace on Saturday, some 100 years after the doomed liner was built in the same yards.

Almost 100,000 tickets for Titanic Belfast, a striking aluminum-clad building which tells the famous ship's story through special effects, interactive screens and a ride, have been sold ahead of the opening.

Eight people have been arrested for allegedly killing two 10-year-old boys and a 55-year-old woman in ritual sacrifices by the cult of La Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, prosecutors in northern Mexico said Friday.

Jose Larrinaga, spokesman for Sonora state prosecutors, said the victims' blood was poured around an altar to the saint, which is depicted as a skeleton holding a scythe and clothed in flowing robes.

Wild applause broke out by the Leaning Tower of Pisa as cheering inhabitants in garish mediaeval costumes celebrated New Year's, welcoming in 2013 nine months before most of the rest of the world.

The once mighty Tuscan maritime republic has revived a tradition dating back centuries, when Pisa had its own calendar which began nine months before Christmas to mark Jesus Christ's miraculous conception instead of his birth.

A painting of a faceless man by Tim Storrier won Australia's most prestigious portraiture prize, the Archibald, along with a cheque for Aus$75,000 (US$78,000).

The work, entitled "The Histrionic Wayfarer (After Bosch)", features a pith-helmeted figure carrying a backpack with his dog Smudge perched on top. The figure has glasses but no face.

An intense and controversial restoration of the last great work by Leonardo da Vinci goes before the public Thursday at the Louvre Museum, revealing "The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" in the full panoply of hues and detail painted by the Renaissance master 500 years ago.

The 18-month-long restoration of the painting that Leonardo labored on for 20 years until his death in 1519 will go a long way to raising "Saint Anne" to its place as one of the most influential Florentine paintings of its time and a step towards the high Renaissance of Michelangelo.

Ernest Hemingway shows a tenderness that wasn't part of his usual macho persona in a dozen unpublished letters that became publicly available Wednesday in a collection of the author's papers at the Kennedy presidential library.

In a letter to his friend Gianfranco Ivancich written in Cuba and dated February 1953, Hemingway wrote of euthanizing his cat "Uncle Willie" after it was hit by a car.

Paper replicas of Apple's iPad and iPhone are selling like hot cakes in China this year as millions prepare to honor their ancestors in an age-old annual festival that has taken on a modern twist.

Tomb Sweeping Day, which falls on April 4 this year, sees families remember their ancestors by laying out food at their grave sites and burning paper replicas of daily necessities such as clothes, money, cars and houses.

For the first time since his death in February, a painting by Spanish artist Antoni Tapies was sold Wednesday at an auction that also featured works by Fernando Botero and Pablo Picasso.

The 1956 grey and black abstract painting sold for 223,630 Euros ($298,443). It had an asking price of 190,000 Euros.

In a synagogue in northeast India, a group of men pray for the chance to "return home" to a country they have never seen and which their ancestors fled nearly 3,000 years ago.

"India is not our country," says Haniel Reuben, 72, one of the eldest members of a tiny community that claims to have descended from the Manasseh -- one of the biblical "lost tribes" of Israel exiled in 720 BC by Assyrian conquerors.

New York's gritty subway has got its sense of poetry back with the return of a popular program to bring verses to commuters.

The Metropolitan Transport Authority, which runs the underground system, announced it was restoring its Poetry in Motion initiative after a hiatus of four years.