More than 100,000 revelers, many dressed in masks and period costume, packed into St Mark's Square for the "flight of the angel" that marks the traditional opening of the Carnival of Venice.

On the twelfth chime of midday from St Mark's Campanile, fearless 22-year-old student Julia Nasi leapt from the famous bell tower, 80 meters above the huge crowd that had gathered for one of the world's most celebrated carnivals.

Britain's first wedding to be held in a Scientology chapel took place in London on Sunday, the result of the newlyweds' triumphing in the Supreme Court last year.

Dressed in a traditional white wedding dress, bride Louisa Hodkin tied the knot with Alessandro Calcioli, both aged 25, in a Church of Scientology chapel in central London, despite earlier being told the venue was not legally listed as a place of religious worship.

Alice Herz-Sommer, the world's oldest known Holocaust survivor and the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, has died in London aged 110, her family announced Sunday.

Herz-Sommer, originally from Prague in what is now the Czech Republic, spent two years of World War II in Czechoslovakia's Terezin concentration camp, where she entertained inmates by playing the piano.

Hundreds of items from the estate of the celebrated pianist Van Cliburn are scheduled to go up for auction next month.

The New York auction house Christie's has scheduled a March 4-5 auction of the Van Cliburn collection. The items were left behind in Cliburn's Fort Worth-area mansion when he died a year ago this month.

Art collectors sued Keith Haring's foundation Friday, saying it has cost them at least $40 million by publicly labeling about 90 paintings by the late artist as "counterfeit" and "fake" as it refuses to fully evaluate them.

The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan portrayed the Keith Haring Foundation Inc.'s approach to authentication as irrational and irresponsible, saying its authentication committee operated for many years "in secret, with little or no explanation, and often without ever physically inspecting the works."

Several countries struggle with the question of what defines nationality — place of birth, loyalty or ethnicity? Any child born in the United States becomes American at birth, regardless of its parents' origins. But that's by no means the global standard.

Here's a look at how other countries define who belongs and who does not — an issue becoming ever more complex in a globalized world:

Scores of copies of Anne Frank's "Diary of a Young Girl" kept in public libraries across Tokyo have been vandalized, officials said Friday, sparking alarm amid a rightward shift in Japan's politics.

Pages in at least 250 copies of the diary or publications containing biographies on Anne Frank, Nazi persecution of Jews and related materials have been torn, the council of public libraries in the capital said.

"It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood."

The line from Shakespeare's Macbeth might easily have been written about the legacy of World War I.

China has long sought to recover treasures it says were looted by foreigners, but a tycoon's $1.6 million deal for the return of seven white marble columns from Norway is raising unusual debate on the issue.

Critics have openly challenged the motives of real estate developer Huang Nubo, whose donation to the KODE Art Museums of Bergen paved the way for the return of the Old Summer Palace relics, and some argued they should not be "bought back".

Jazz musicians are famous for their musical conversations — one improvises a few bars and another plays an answer. Now research shows some of the brain's language regions enable that musical back-and-forth much like a spoken conversation.

It gives new meaning to the idea of music as a universal language.