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Yiddish Paper Gives 'Dying' Language New Life

It'll be computer scrolling, not ancient scrolls, for Jewish culture lovers when the world's most famous Yiddish newspaper relaunches its website Monday in a bid to stave off extinction.

Forverts, founded in 1897 when Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe were pouring into America, has been shrinking relentlessly in recent decades as new generations of immigrant families abandon their ancestral language.

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Dozens Suspended in Harvard Cheat Scandal

Around 60 students at Harvard University have been suspended and others disciplined in a mass cheating scandal at the elite college, the administration said Friday.

Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Michael Smith told staff and students at the university near Boston that "somewhat more than half" of the cases under investigation ended with students being required "to withdraw from the college for a period of time."

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Proud Russia Remembers Stalingrad 70 Years on

The city of Volgograd was renamed Stalingrad for a day Saturday as Russia marked the 70-year anniversary of a brutal battle in which the Red Army defeated Nazi forces and changed the course of World War II.

Commuter buses emblazoned with pictures of the feared Soviet dictator ran across the southern city as patriotic Russians remembered what many view as the Soviet people's greatest achievement.

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Paris Offers to Help Restore Precious Timbuktu Documents

France's national library said Friday it was prepared to lead an international effort to save centuries-old manuscripts feared destroyed or damaged by Islamists as they were chased out of the northern Malian city of Timbuktu.

The Bibliotheque Nationale "stands ready to come to the aid of the Ahmed Baba Institute, seriously affected by recent events, in agreement with Malian and French authorities, when the situation allows", the library said in a statement.

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Movie from Rushdie Book Opens in Mumbai

The film adaptation of Salman Rushdie's book "Midnight's Children" has opened in India with the cast in attendance.

The Booker Prize-winning novel chronicles the lives of two children who get switched at birth on the day of India's independence in 1947.

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Myanmar Festival Celebrates New Literary Freedom

Dozens of renowned international and local writers gathered Friday at Myanmar's first international literary festival to celebrate the country's new-found freedom of expression.

Authors hailed the festival -- supported by Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi -- as a breakthrough for creativity after years lost to stifling censorship rules under the generals who ruled the country for decades.

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As Indian Art World Meets, Prices Stay Depressed

India's art world has converged on New Delhi for the industry's biggest annual event where upbeat talk and parties are likely to disguise a market that is still in the doldrums since crashing in 2008.

Indian art auction prices are down 70 to 75 percent from their peak, when speculation driven by new prosperity in cities such as Delhi and Mumbai pushed them to "unsustainable levels", says art analyst Anders Petterson.

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Activists Try to Save Old Warsaw Ghetto Building

It was the place where Jewish women did their ritual bathing. It was a tuberculosis clinic. It survived the German onslaught and became a gathering point for Holocaust survivors.

Now "the white building," the headquarters of the Jewish community and one of the few surviving remnants of the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, could be torn down to make way for a multistory tower that would fit seamlessly into a modern city skyline.

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Wine Making Takes Root in Long-Isolated Myanmar

Myanmar may be best known for its decades of junta rule, but behind the bamboo curtain maverick entrepreneurs have toiled for years to put the nation on the map for the quality of its wine.

Vines cascade down terraces overlooking the vast mirror of Inle Lake in northeastern Myanmar, an unlikely setting for a budding wine industry tempting the tastebuds of tourists now flocking to the country as it opens up.

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UNESCO Plans Mission to Assess 'Wanton Destruction' in Mali

The U.N. cultural organization UNESCO on Wednesday said it would send a mission to the historic city of Timbuktu in war-torn Mali as soon as possible to assess the damage done to ancient cultural sites.

"UNESCO will send a mission, as soon as security permits, to undertake a complete evaluation of the damage and determine the most urgent needs, in order to finalize a plan of action... that will guide reconstruction and rehabilitation," the body's director general Irina Bokova said in a statement.

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