Chinese authorities have closed a museum which contained scores of fake exhibits, including a vase decorated with cartoon characters billed as a Qing dynasty artefact, state-run media reported Tuesday.

The facility, built in northern China's Hebei province at a cost of 540 million yuan ($88 million), has "no qualification to be a museum as its collections are fake", a local official told the Global Times newspaper.

A new stamp emblazoned with the face of Marianne, France's revolutionary symbol, has caused a stir after its creator said it was inspired by a Ukrainian feminist known for topless protests.

The stamp, unveiled by President Francois Hollande on Sunday's national day, shows the face of a youthful, dewy-eyed Marianne from the shoulders up, her long hair flowing down and her hand raised.

The Magna Carta will be on the move in 2015.

The British Library plans to celebrate the 800th birthday of the document that laid the foundations of Britain's common law and civil liberties by uniting all four surviving original copies under one roof for the first time.

The World Youth Day (WYD) events Pope Francis will attend in Brazil later this month are a tradition started by the John Paul II during his charismatic papacy.

"You are the future of the world and the hope for the Church," his Polish predecessor, who is soon to be declared a saint, told young Catholics at the dawn of his papacy in 1978.

A Prague railway station that saw tens of thousands of Czech Jews leave for ghettos and Nazi death camps between 1941 and 1945 is to become a memorial for those who died.

Czech Jews and Holocaust survivors have for years been calling for a memorial for the Prague-Bubny station, which last year welcomed a theatre troupe that roamed the Czech Republic and Poland on board a train to perform a play about the Holocaust.

The elderly residents of one Chinese county have endured invasion, civil war and famine, and many live in unheated concrete shacks on only a few dollars a day. But they are apparently among the longest-living people on earth.

Chengmai, a string of villages dotted with orange plantations in the tropical island province of Hainan, claims more than 200 residents aged over 100 out of a population of 560,000 -- one of the highest ratios in the world.

Around 65,000 people have queued for hours in Saint Petersburg to see a religious relic brought from Greece, officials said Saturday, in the latest sign of the Russian Orthodox Church's influence in post-Soviet Russia.

The cross of Saint Andrew -- said to be a relic of the X-shaped cross on which Andrew the Apostle was crucified -- was placed in Saint Petersburg's Kazan Cathedral on Thursday after arriving from its historic home in Patras in Greece.

Swiss authorities said Friday they had returned a pre-Columbian ceramic jug to Peru after police caught someone trying to sell it over the Internet.

The Geneva public prosecutor's office said it had returned the small, two-handled jug dating from the pre-Columbian Chancay period between the 12th and 15th centuries to the Peruvian embassy in Bern.

"My Education" (Viking) by Susan Choi

Our first glimpse of Regina Gottlieb is as a graduate student in her first days at a prestigious university. Somewhat naïve and more than a little intimidated by the sea of bright lights around her, Regina is drawn to a notorious and notoriously handsome English professor whose reputation has been both burnished and tarnished by rumors of sexual misbehavior.

Fierce debate has erupted among experts in China over the discovery of 5,000-year-old inscriptions that some believe represent the earliest record of Chinese characters.

Pottery pieces and stone vessels unearthed at the Zhuangqiaofen archaeological site in the eastern province of Zhejiang push "the origin of the written language back 1,000 years", the state-run Global Times newspaper reported.