Violin virtuoso Frank Almond had spent years learning the nuances of the 300-year-old Stradivarius violin that its owner had loaned to him. So when the $5 million instrument was stolen last month and recovered nine days later, he was worried it might have sustained serious damage in the process.

Fortunately it turned out to be fine, he said Tuesday.

A U.S. museum official says construction workers have found a tusk from an ice age mammoth.

KIRO-TV reports that the workers stopped digging when they found the fossil and called Seattle's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

A controversial plan to ban women in Spain from freely opting for abortions faced a hurdle on Tuesday when lawmakers were to vote on a motion to scrap the reform.

The plan has not only outraged pro-choice groups but has sparked division even within the conservative ruling party.

Activists on Tuesday called for more surveillance of Syrian archaeological sites and a crackdown on trading in looted art at the opening of an international campaign to save the war-torn country's heritage.

The campaign, launched in Rome and entitled "The Forgotten Victim in Syria", is being supported by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin along with leading figures from the worlds of politics and art.

China expressed outrage Monday at a proposal by a Japanese city to list letters written by World War II suicide pilots on a United Nations register -- alongside Anne Frank's diary.

Minami-Kyushu last week filed an application to include the Japanese kamikaze pilots' farewell letters on a Unesco world memory list, media including public broadcaster NHK have reported.

Activists took to a piano perched on Kiev's most famous anti-government barricade Monday, playing Chopin, the national anthem and the Beatles' "Let it Be" as riot police looked on.

Eurovision song contest winner Ruslana joined others in gently stroking the instrument -- painted in the blue and yellow colours of the Ukrainian flag -- as it sat delicately poised on a barrier separating protesters from police.

Syrian painter and dissident Youssef Abdelke offers a haunting vision of the war tearing his country apart, in which neither individuals nor symbols are spared from violence.

One painting shows a knife hanging over the corpse of a bird, another the empty gaze of the mothers of "martyrs" lost to the fighting, and a third shows a decapitated head.

With 17 of their 25 children still living at home, breakfast is a military operation for the Dargers.

As organized chaos unfolds at the family home in the Utah countryside outside Salt Lake City, the parents come to help out.

Deep in a remote forest in the Indonesian archipelago, the Kajang tribe lives much as it has done for centuries, resisting nearly all the trappings of modern life.

Their lifestyle has drawn comparisons with the Amish in the U.S., but they live in even more basic conditions, residing in houses on stilts and dressing only in black sarongs and headdresses.

Thousands of women marched in the streets of Madrid on Saturday to protest against the Spanish government's plan to restrict access to abortion.

They yelled "Freedom of abortion!" and waved signs such as "MPs and rosaries, out of my ovaries", targeting the Catholic Church as the supposed driver of the reform.