The Yasukuni Shrine is a Shinto sanctuary in Tokyo originally built in 1869 to honor those who gave their lives for Japan.

Around 2.5 million souls are enshrined there, the vast majority of them soldiers who died in Japan's armed conflicts running up to and including World War II.

An Indian yoga guru on Tuesday ended a six-day hunger strike against corruption but vowed to use his public popularity to pile pressure on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Baba Ramdev, a maverick "holy man" who heads a wealthy international yoga organization, sipped juice to break his fast as several thousand supporters cheered him in New Delhi.

The evening turban-tying class in the Sikh-dominated Indian city of Amritsar is packed with pre-teen boys learning a centuries-old tradition -- that religious leaders fear is under threat.

Over the next 90 minutes, the instructors unfurl long strips of cloth in vibrant hues from indigo to burgundy, and proceed to knot, pleat and finally tie them carefully around the boys' heads.

A Hungarian festival for those claiming kinship with the ancient nomadic Huns wound down Sunday after drawing tens of thousands of distant cousins from across Asia and the Caucasus.

Police said some 80,000 people descended on the village of Bugac for three days of concerts, horse racing, folk dances, archery and other activities at the "Kurultaj" festival, a word of Turkish origin meaning "tribal meeting".

Russian Cossacks on horseback Sunday kicked off a two-month-long friendly march on Paris to mark the bicentenary of a key battle Russia fought against Napoleon that led to an eventual French defeat.

The commemorative horse trek spanning some 2,500 kilometers (1,560 miles) and estimated to cost $2.5 million (2.0 million euros) is supported by the Russian government and comes amid a drive to boost Russia's global standing.

"It's there," says an archaeologist pointing to the ground, where fragments of a Buddha statue from the ancient Gandhara civilization have been covered up to stop them being stolen or vandalized.

Just months before the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, the Taliban regime shocked the world by destroying two giant, 1,500-year-old Buddhas in the rocky Bamiyan valley, branding them un-Islamic.

He may not be able to resuscitate Hong Kong's long-dead incense trade but entrepreneur Chan Koon-wing is at least hoping to save the tree that gave the city its name centuries ago.

Chan returned to the southern Chinese city from his adopted home in Northern Ireland four years ago to revive his late grandfather's incense-tree plantation in the northern village of Shing Ping, near the border with the mainland.

Former East German strongman Erich Honecker religiously knocked back pure lemon juice every morning to ward off colds, his long-serving butler reveals in a new book.

The notoriously dour Honecker, who ran communist East Germany from 1976 until just before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, was very attentive to his health, Lothar Herzog says in "Honecker Privat" (The Private Honecker).

Pyotr Fomenko, one of Russia's most celebrated directors known for his inventive adaptation of the classics, has died in Moscow at the age of 80, city officials said on Thursday.

"Pyotr Fomenko died today," a spokeswoman for Moscow's culture department told Agence France Presse.

Hundreds of patients at Argentina's biggest mental hospital are turning fine arts training into real ability as painters, actors and musicians, are getting a fuller sense of self along the way.

"Art really can be a tool for change in society. And you can see its effects, because art can heal people," said Mirtha Otazua, a psychologist and coordinator of an acting workshop at Jose Tiburcio Borda Mental Hospital.