Waxworks museum Madame Tussauds opened a branch in Sydney on Monday with Australian personalities Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman sharing the stage with Barack Obama and Lady Gaga.

The world-famous London attraction set up shop in tourist precinct Darling Harbor after 56,000 hours of work creating the 70 figures on display.

Ella Fitzgerald has given concerts there. So have Sarah Vaughn, Aretha Franklin, Duke Ellington, James Brown, and Miles Davis.

The Howard Theatre, the first concert hall for blacks, is reborn this week from its ashes, more than a century after it opened in Washington DC.

Thousands of Christian pilgrims are gathering in Jerusalem for an ancient fire ritual that celebrates Jesus' resurrection.

They have crowded Saturday into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where many Christian traditions hold that Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected.

Chaos and man's attempts to tame it are at the heart of a spectacular new show at Paris' museum of tribal arts that pits voodoo and shamanic artifacts alongside the work of contemporary artists.

By the entrance to the show stands a voodoo talisman meant to ward off evil spirits -- a colorful female statue with a calabash at its center, and covered with grasses, fabric, palm oil and scraps of animal horn.

Tibetan herder Gatou used to live a nomadic life on the grasslands of the Tibetan plateau before he was rehoused under a controversial Chinese government scheme.

Now he inhabits one of scores of small brick houses that have sprung up in incongruously neat rows in the rugged and mountainous terrain of the Guoluo Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China.

His LSD-inspired heroes, rampant sex and frontal assaults on political correctness made comic artist Robert Crumb an icon of U.S. counter-culture, but why on earth, he wonders, put his work on show in a museum?

Crumb's cult universe, from hippy-era characters like "Fritz the Cat" to his cartoon take on the Bible, is on show -- uncensored -- until August at Paris' Museum of Modern Art, hosting the largest-ever retrospective of his work.

After the death of their spiritual leader, more than 2,000 Egyptian Copts have poured into the Holy Land for the Easter holidays, defying a ban he imposed on visiting Jerusalem and other Israeli-controlled areas.

The influx — after decades when Egyptian pilgrims were a rarity — adds a new element to the already diverse mix of languages and faiths in Jerusalem's Old City during the holy season. The pilgrims are clearly distinguished by the Egyptian accent of their Arabic and long cotton robes worn by many of the men.

Wafts of perfume thrill visitors as soon as they set foot in the frescoed halls of the Santa Maria Novella pharmacy in Florence, a perfumer to poets, film stars and noblewomen through the ages.

The perfumer actually traces its roots back to 1221 by Dominican friars who cultivated medicinal herbs to make potions and balms and the company is housed in mediaeval halls with spectacular views on a cloister in the city center.

Home to 4,000 people and overlooking the strategic Straits of Hormuz that Iran has threatened to close, Kumzar village has a thousand year-old language of its own that no one else on earth understands.

Nestled on the northernmost tip of Oman's Musandam peninsula and hidden by spectacular mountains that plunge into the Gulf's aquamarine waters, tiny Kumzar is a simple fishing village that is a haven for dolphins and teems with marine life.

Serbian police have uncovered a painting by French Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne stolen from Switzerland in 2008 and arrested three suspects, local media said Thursday.

According to private broadcaster B92 the police found the painting "The Boy in the Red Vest" (1894-95) late Wednesday in Belgrade. Estimated to be worth tens of millions of euros (dollars), it was stolen from the E.G. Buehrle collection in Zurich together with paintings by Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet, B92 added.