It was the early hours of April 26, 1986 and operators at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet republic of Ukraine were to carry out an electrical power test at reactor number four.

The test, which repeated one carried out the previous year, was to take advantage of a planned shutdown of the reactor for routine maintenance and the lowering of its power had already started the previous afternoon.

Cuba readied a huge military parade Saturday to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its victory over the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion for a Communist Party congress setting new political and economic goals.

Painters, electricians and audio operators put the finishing touches on Plaza de la Revolucion, as troops drove tanks and other military vehicles to their designated locations along the streets.

Armenia is to make chess a compulsory subject in primary schools in an attempt to turn itself into a global force in the game, the education ministry said on Friday.

"Teaching chess in schools will create a solid basis for the country to become a chess superpower," an official at the ministry, Arman Aivazian, told Agence France Presse.

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade on Friday opened the capital city's national Grand Theatre, an imposing building constructed by the public Chinese company Complant, near the capital's station.

Wade thanked China "for this majestic jewel" which cost 16 billion CFA francs (24 million euros/34.6 million dollars) and hailed the "dynamics, pragmatism and efficiency" marking the two countries' cooperation.

A London gallery has sent back to Greece six stolen icons dated from the 18th and 19th centuries, and six more found in The Netherlands were to be returned, the culture ministry said Thursday.

The pieces returned from Britain were temporarily displayed at a Byzantine museum in Athens where Culture Minister Pavlos Geroulanos said the finds were a "great success against the forces that want to harm our patrimony".

France Thursday sent back a shipment of ancient Korean royal books, 145 years after its troops looted them during a retaliatory raid on an island west of Seoul.

Two containers carrying 75 volumes of "Uigue", illustrated manuals on royal protocol written during the Chosun Dynasty (1392-1910), arrived at Incheon airport after being released by the National Library of France.

It's safe to say that the Emperor Nero -- the subject of a major new exhibition and archaeology trail that opened in the Roman Forum this week -- has always had something of an image problem.

He has gone down in the history books as the man who had his domineering mother Agrippina killed, kicked his pregnant wife Poppaea to death and -- as legend would have it -- played his lyre on a hill while Rome burnt below him.

Two Roman nails dating back 2000 years, found in the burial cave of the Jewish high priest who handed Jesus over to the Romans, may be linked to the crucifixion, an Israeli filmmaker has claimed.

The gnarled bits of iron, which measure around three inches (eight centimeters) each, were shown to reporters in Jerusalem on Tuesday at the premier of a television documentary series examining the question of whether they could have been the nails used to crucify Jesus.

Italy's culture minister Tuesday announced a major new restoration project for the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, following international outrage over the collapse of a house and a wall at the site.

"In an archaeological area of this size, the urgency never goes away but the restoration starts tomorrow," Giancarlo Galan said at a news conference.

Americans on Tuesday mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the U.S. Civil War, a bloody conflict that historians say still deeply influences the United States.

"The Civil War is one of the most significant events in American history in terms of the way the American nation was defined," said William Link, a historian at the University of Florida.