Alarm bells are ringing once more over the upkeep of Italy's historic monuments, from the Roman city of Pompeii to the Colosseum, with budget cuts hampering repairs and UNESCO issuing a stern rebuke.

"Over the last five years, the culture budget has been reduced by two thirds," Culture Minister Massimo Bray complained in an interview on Monday published in Italian newspapers.

Over a hundred "burial jars" and a dozen coffins arranged on a ledge in remote Cambodian jungle have for centuries held the bones -- and secrets -- of a mysterious people who lived alongside with the Angkor era.

Why the bones were placed in jars on a cliff some 100 meters (320 feet) high in the Cardamom Mountains, or indeed whose remains they are, has long puzzled experts.

Sri Lanka has banned the latest issue of Time magazine over its cover story on Myanmar's Buddhist-Muslim clashes, which it said could hurt religious sentiment on the island, an official said Tuesday.

Customs department spokesman Leslie Gamini said they held the July 1 issue because it carried a photo of a prominent Myanmar monk under the headline: "The Face of Buddhist Terror".

The famed Baalbek International Festival, normally held in the town's spectacular Roman ruins, will be held this year in the Northern Metn district of Jdeideh near the capital Beirut, the festival's organizing committee said on Monday.

La Magnanerie, a former silk factory that dates back to the nineteenth century, will be this year's venue, the committee announced in a statement.

Confederate flags are a hot-button issue in the United States almost a century and a half after the end of the American Civil War.

Case in point: to celebrate this coming week's 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, Virginia asked Minnesota to loan it such a flag seized during that turning point in the war, which concluded in 1865.

Hordes of trekkers flocked to Mount Fuji Monday at the start of a two-month climbing season, after it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in recognition of its status as a symbol of Japan.

Hundreds of hikers began their ascent of the 3,776-metre (12,389-feet) peak before dawn in a bid to stand at the summit to watch the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean.

The centuries-old skull of a white man found in Australia is raising questions about whether Captain James Cook really was the first European to land on the country's east coast.

The skull was found in northern New South Wales in late 2011, and police initially prepared themselves for a gruesome murder investigation.

French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault on Friday handed back to China two rare bronzes plundered from Beijing's Old Summer Palace during the Second Opium War in 1860.

The bronzes of two animal heads were the subject of controversy in 2009, when they were put up for auction at Christie's by Pierre Berge, the partner of late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent.

Polish and Peruvian archaeologists have discovered a royal burial chamber with 60 mummies and some 1,200 gold, silver and ceramic objects from over 1,000 years ago in Peru.

The mummies -- including three princesses -- and other items date back to a pre-Inca culture called the Wari, who peaked between the seventh and 11th centuries, researchers said.

China denied changing its stance on exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Saturday, after reports said Beijing had relaxed its policies of publicly denouncing him and banning worship of his image.

"Our policy towards the Dalai Lama is clear and consistent, and has not changed," China's state bureau of religious affairs said in a fax sent to Agence France Presse.