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.

Police in Tehran are conducting a new crackdown on women wearing mandatory headscarves improperly or in "vulgar" dress, the city's police chief said, according to media reports on Saturday.

Such operations, which see police screening foot and vehicle traffic at major junctions and shopping centers, are conducted fairly often in Iran.

A 15th-century French manuscript with intricate miniature paintings sold at a Paris auction on Friday for two million euros, the Drouot auction house said.

Commissioned in the third decade of the 15th century, the book was put on sale by the French firm Millon. It earlier belonged to Jean Andre Hachette, who had acquired a huge collection of ancient books and drawings.

The only privately owned version of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" is estimated to sell for at least $80 million at Sotheby's next week as the star of the New York spring art auctions.

Picasso's portrait of Dora Maar, estimated to sell for $20 million to $30 million at Sotheby's on Wednesday, and Cezanne's "Joueurs de Cartes," estimated to fetch $15 million to $20 million at Christie's on Tuesday, are other highlights of the Impressionist and modern sales.

A German couple on Friday opened a museum devoted to legendary British rock band, the Rolling Stones, complete with urinals in the shape of the group's famous "tongue" logo.

The museum, in the small eastern German town of Luechow, will show "thousands of pieces" of memorabilia, including an original signed pool table the group took on tour, instruments, posters and a Stones pinball machine.