The Romanian Academy has corrected the definitions of anti-Semitic and racist words in the latest edition of a widely-circulated dictionary, after protests from Jewish and Roma groups.

"The definitions of 30 words related to the Roma have been revised in the latest edition of the DEX dictionary," Roma rights group Impreuna said Thursday.

Claude Tayag sees himself as a food missionary, hoping to convert people at home and abroad to the secret cuisine wonders of the Philippines.

The Southeast Asian nation's table-fare has long suffered a poor reputation internationally compared with its regional neighbors.

Ukraine mourned Thursday the 26th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, as its president prepared to launch construction of a vital new shelter to contain the stricken nuclear plant.

In a message mourning the victims, President Viktor Yanukovych described Chernobyl as the "largest human-caused disaster of the 20th century" and thanked countries that have contributed to the massive sarcophagus project.

Germany's Jewish community on Wednesday welcomed a landmark decision to republish Adolf Hitler's manifesto "Mein Kampf" for the first time since World War II, in an annotated edition.

The southern state of Bavaria, which holds the rights, has not permitted reprints of the vicious anti-Semitic tract and rambling memoir since the Nazi leader's 1945 suicide.

Around 870,000 images of New York City and its operations have been made available online to the public for the first time, retracing 160 years of the Big Apple's history.

The new site, www.nyc.gov/records, was so popular that it was unavailable on Wednesday, a day after its official launch.

Armenians around the world Tuesday marked the 97th anniversary of the World War I massacre of their ancestors by Ottoman Turks, rekindling anger at Turkey for denying the deaths were genocide.

Thousands took part in an annual procession to a hilltop memorial in the Armenian capital Yerevan, carrying candles and flowers to lay at the eternal flame at the center of the monument commemorating the mass killings in what was then the Ottoman Empire.

The opera glasses Abraham Lincoln held when he was fatally shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865 are on the auction block.

Lincoln carried the opera glasses to a showing of the play "Our American Cousin" when John Wilkes Booth burst into the president's theater box and shot him in the head with a pistol at close range.

The intense relationship between Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and Ambroise Vollard, one of the great art dealers of the 20th century, is at the heart of an exhibition on Venice's Grand Canal.

Vollard -- who championed many of the upcoming artists of his day including Cezanne, Van Gogh and Renoir -- is credited with discovering and befriending the young Picasso and commissioning some of his most striking etchings.

The first major U.S. retrospective of Chinese artist Wu Guanzhong opens Wednesday in New York, fulfilling the painter's dying wish to be better known in the West -- and signaling the continued rise of Chinese art on the international stage.

Wu, whose 1919-2010 life spanned nearly all of China's tumultuous 20th century and rise as a world power in the 21st, had previously been shown in Europe but never in a serious way in the United States.

The acclaimed composer and pianist Fazil Say said Monday that he was turning his back on his native Turkey and would live in exile in Japan after becoming disillusioned by the rise of conservative Islam.

In an interview with the Hurriyet daily, Say spoke of how he felt completely ostracized by Turkish society since he declared that he was an atheist and that the criticism he had received had highlighted a growing culture of intolerance.