A New Zealand bar manager and his two Myanmar colleagues were sentenced on Tuesday to two and a half years in jail by a Yangon court over using a Buddha image to promote a cheap drinks night.

Philip Blackwood, who worked at the VGastro bar in Yangon, was found guilty of insulting religion along with the bar's Myanmar owner and manager after the New Zealander posted the offending mocked-up photo of the Buddha wearing DJ headphones on Facebook.

As Iraq struggles to protect its ancient sites and heritage from the Islamic State group, the United States returned some 60 historical items to the country on Monday, many dating to thousands of years ago.

Ancient glass vessels, clay images and bronze spears and axes were on display in Iraq's consulate in the United States as part of the hand over.

It was the front where the war which seemed to have no end finally turned, where the world's first truly global military force was assembled, and where air power's deadly potential was first demonstrated.

But only now, a century after World War I began in the Balkans with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 in Sarajevo, is it being slowly rescued from the footnotes of history.

Argentine authorities have arrested two Paraguayans who tried to cross the border with a 19th-century gold ingot worth more than $2 million, officials said Monday.

The ingot, which has been confiscated by Argentina's tax authorities, weighed 25 kilograms (55 pounds) and was stamped with the inscription "Central Bank of Paraguay -- 1824."

Latvian veterans who fought on Nazi Germany's side against the Soviets in World War II staged a controversial march in Riga on Monday to mark the anniversary of a 1944 battle. 

Around 1,500 people took part in the parade through Riga's Old Town amid massive police security, Latvia's deputy chief of police Artis Velss told Agence France Presse, with no arrests reported by midday.

An English teacher from rural Maine won the $1 million Global Teacher Prize on Sunday after 42 years of work as an innovator and pioneer in teaching literature.

Nancie Atwell plans to donate the full amount to the Center for Teaching and Learning which she founded in 1990 in Edgecomb, Maine as a nonprofit demonstration school created for the purpose of developing and disseminating teaching methods. The school says 97 percent of its graduates have gone on to university.

Women are far more exposed to disasters than men given their frontline roles in the home and in healthcare, the UN says, arguing that improving gender equality is key to saving lives.

Globally, women and children are up to 14 times more likely than men to die in a disaster, according to UN Population Fund account executive Lamar Dawson.

In 1857, bushy-whiskered Emperor Franz Joseph proclaimed that his rapidly growing imperial capital Vienna needed a radical makeover befitting Austro-Hungary's wealth, might and technological prowess.

This year, the centerpiece of the mammoth urban engineering project that ensued -- the resplendent, five-kilometer (three-mile) "Ringstrasse" boulevard ringing old Vienna -- turns 150.

Hailed as one of the greatest living composers, Pierre Boulez is earning worldwide praise as he approaches 90, even as he sometimes suffers in his native France from the idea that he is stern and dogmatic.

Ahead of his birthday on March 26, the Philharmonie de Paris -- the brand-new, ultra-modern concert hall that was conceived in no small part by Boulez -- is seeking to dispel that notion with a new exhibition. 

A statue of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi was unveiled on Saturday at the symbolic heart of the British establishment that once loathed him for his campaign against imperial rule.

Gandhi joins figures including Britain's World War II leader Winston Churchill, who described him as a half-naked "fakir", in London's Parliament Square, opposite Big Ben and the House of Commons.