On its towering hilltop perch, the Krak des Chevaliers, one of the world's best preserved Crusader castles, held off a siege by the Muslim warrior Saladin nearly 900 years ago. It was lauded by Lawrence of Arabia for its beauty and has been one of the crown jewels of Syria's tourism.

But it has fallen victim to the chaos of Syria's uprising and the crackdown against it by President Bashar Assad's regime. Recently, gunmen broke into the castle, threw out the staff and began excavations to loot the site, says Bassam Jammous, general director of the Antiquities and Museum Department in Damascus.

A rare watercolor by French artist Paul Cezanne fetched $19.12 million at Christie's auction house in New York late Tuesday.

The painting, titled "A Card Player," kicked off a spring auction of impressionist and modern art.

Can the Muslim headscarf be synonymous with glamour?

Turkey's first fashion magazine for conservative Islamic women looks set to win the challenge.

The largest-ever collection of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of the human body is going on display at Buckingham Palace.

The exhibition at the palace's Queen's Gallery includes 87 pages from the artist's notebooks and groundbreaking anatomical sketches.

Adam Glasser has forged his career in jazz by re-interpreting classics from his native South Africa on his chromatic harmonica, a surprisingly challenging instrument he never expected to take up.

"Harmonica can sound dreadful," said Glasser, who admitted to trepidation at learning to play the tiny instrument first given to him by his father, famed South African composer Stanley Glasser.

Arnel Valencia felt humiliated at school when he was barred from using the language he spoke at home, part of a decades-long pattern of linguistic destruction across the Philippines.

"'Stop talking like a bird. You should use English or the national language," Valencia, now 39 and a village elder, said his first-grade teacher told him.

A vast archive of documents linked to the Holocaust said Monday it would preserve 300,000 original prisoner files from the Dachau concentration camp in Germany that are disintegrating.

The International Tracing Service (ITS) in the western German town of Bad Arolsen uses its vast trove of historical records to help victims of Nazi persecution and their families and make them available to researchers.

Home to more billionaires than New York or London and with a thirst for art to match, Moscow is turning into a key pre-sale destination for auction houses with world masters on their hands.

London-based Christie's and its U.S. counterpart Sotheby's first descended on Russia in the 1990s as interest in post-Soviet kitsch soared.

One of Australia's richest men, Clive Palmer, on Monday unveiled plans to build a 21st century version of the doomed Titanic in China, with its first voyage from England to New York set for 2016.

Palmer, a self-made mining billionaire, said he had commissioned state-owned Chinese company CSC Jinling Shipyard to construct Titanic II with the same dimensions as its predecessor.

On a street corner, under a garbage dump, at a construction site -- pre-Inca archeological sites abound in Lima, where the ruins of hundreds of sacred places, or "huacas", are at the mercy of urban growth and public indifference.

In the middle of the Miraflores residential district, one of Lima's best restaurants opens onto the terrace of an ancient pyramid, offering fine food in a 1,500 year-old setting bathed in artificial lighting.