Sham marriages to win the right to live in Britain are more prevalent than thought and a major risk to immigration control, a group of lawmakers warned on Friday.

The number of suspect couples referred to the interior ministry each year had more than doubled over the past three years to 2,145, a parliamentary committee said.

A special exhibition on childhood in the British royal family is to open at Buckingham Palace on Saturday, featuring well-loved toys spanning 250 years including a gadget-laden miniature James Bond supercar.

The Royal Childhood exhibition at the London palace features more than 150 objects, including cherished outfits, family photographs and private film footage.

Sculptures thought to be by masters Degas and Rodin have been found in the flat of the late German art collector whose priceless hoard included Nazi-looted works, investigators said Thursday.

Images of the works, once their origins are verified, will be published in the online inventory www.lostart.de to help trace their rightful owners in case they were once plundered by the Nazis, said the task force in charge of the investigation.

Japan must work to "eliminate misogyny" if it wants to draw more women into the workforce as part of a wider bid to stimulate the economy, said the head of the United Nations Development Program.

Helen Clark, a former New Zealand prime minister, made the comments in an interview with AFP ahead of the release of the agency's 2014 Human Development Report in Tokyo on Thursday.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy is getting his old look back on new collectors' coins.

The slain president's profile debuted on the half dollar 50 years ago, and the image was subtly tweaked and sharpened in the 1990s. Now the U.S. Mint is producing collectors' coins that restore the original 1964 design, which incorporated suggestions from a grieving Jacqueline Kennedy.

More than 2.2 billion people are "poor or near-poor", with financial crises, natural disasters, soaring food prices and violent conflicts threatening to exacerbate the problem, a United Nations report said Thursday.

While poverty is in decline worldwide, growing inequality and "structural vulnerabilities" remain a serious threat, said the report by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), released in Tokyo.

As she nears retirement along with millions of other Chinese, He Xiangying is too busy sending her son money and raising a stranger's child to worry about who will eventually look after her.

The nanny's plan is to work until her health fails, then go back to her home village in the Chinese countryside and grow vegetables to save money.

The "Colbert Bump" is becoming contagious.

Edan Lepucki, whose novel "California" became a best-seller thanks to a plug from Stephen Colbert, has in turn helped another book catch on.

An 18-hour version of Shakespeare's epic "Henry VI" ended to sustained applause early Tuesday at France's top arts festival in Avignon, marking a triumph for the play's 32-year-old director.

The daunting task involving 21 actors, 150 characters, seven intermissions and 10,000 verses took a decade to come to fruition, director Thomas Jolly said, describing a long-cherished dream that finally turned to reality.

The iconic piano from Hollywood romance "Casablanca" goes on sale at auction in New York in November, the highlight of more than two dozen collectors' items from the fabled war-time classic.

"Play it, Sam," says a stunning Ingrid Berman, cajoling Dooley Wilson into singing "As Time Goes By" before a moody Humphrey Bogart storms over to find his ex-lover sitting in his nightclub.