An extraordinary collection of shipwrecked 17th and 18th century Spanish treasure discovered off the coast of Florida has sold in New York for about $2 million, an auction house said Thursday.

U.S. treasure hunter Mel Fisher was most famous for discovering the shipwrecked Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which went down in a hurricane in 1622, laden with New World riches.

Authorities blocked a colours festival in southern Iraq, using concrete barriers to close off the park where it was to be held, an Agence France Presse journalist reported.

The festival in the port city of Basra would have followed one in Baghdad in which grinning young people dressed in white shirts gathered and covered each other in clouds of coloured powder and engaged in a massive water fight.

In the pre-dawn hours of July 22, 1974, a transport plane full of Greek commandos on a secret mission to Cyprus was shot down by friendly fire.

For more than 40 years, the exact whereabouts of the remains of 19 of the soldiers -- sent to support Greek Cypriot forces against invading Turkish troops -- has been a mystery.

Swords and battle axes drawn, shields up, combatants thrust and parry in a stunning recreation of Viking battles at the Icelandic Festival of Manitoba in Canada's midwest.

The annual Gimli summer festival dates back 126 years to the colonization of the south shore of Lake Winnipeg by Icelandic immigrants.

Pope Francis on Thursday slammed the "atrocious, inhuman and inexplicable" persecution of Christians and minorities, urging the international community not to remain silent.

"May global public opinion be ever more attentive, sensitive and active faced with the persecutions carried out against Christians, and more generally, against religious minorities," the pontiff said in a message to the Jordanian Catholic Church.

Legendary photojournalist Robert Capa may be primarily known for his dramatic black-and-white war images, but an exhibition in Budapest is casting light on his lesser-known color peacetime pictures.

For six decades after his death in 1954, Capa's color images remained largely overlooked -- until the "Capa in Color" exhibition was launched in New York last year.

Tens of thousands of people gathered in Hiroshima Thursday to mark 70 years since the atomic bombing that helped end World War II but still divides opinion today over whether the total destruction it caused was justified.

Bells tolled as a solemn crowd observed a moment of silence at 8:15 am local time (2315 GMT), when the detonation turned the western Japanese city into an inferno, killing thousands instantly and leaving others to die a slow death with horrible injuries.

When Elena and May were growing up, you didn't talk about the separatist group ETA and the decades of killings in their native Basque country. Now they are shouting and crying about it.

Actors in their forties, they are at a high school, playing out for their young audience the dramatised scenes of hatred and tension that Basques in northern Spain have suffered.

School holidays are a bad idea, at least when it comes to children's spelling and arithmetic in the short term, according to scientists in Austria.

A study by Graz University of 182 children aged 10-12 showed that after Austria's nine weeks of summer vacation, the children showed "significant falls" in these areas.

The Enola Gay was on its long flight back to its Pacific island base when co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis opened his log and scribbled down the many questions racing through his mind.

"Just how many Japs did we kill?" wondered Lewis after the dazzling silver B-29 bomber dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan -- and, in doing so, altered the course of history forever.