His golden "The Kiss" adorns scarves and coffee mugs worldwide, while his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer sparked a decades-long restitution battle: in 2012, Austria celebrates 150 years since Klimt's birth.

Gustav Klimt, born on July 14, 1862, is one of the best known figures of the Jugendstil art period.

Cuba's patron saint wrapped up a 16-month pilgrimage here Friday ahead of a papal visit early next year to mark the 400th anniversary of the relic's legendary discovery.

The statue of Our Lady of Charity, the patroness of Cuba, has criss-crossed 28,000-kilometers (18,000 miles) of the communist Caribbean island since beginning its tour in August 2010.

As their wooden boat nears the river's edge, hunters from Malaysia's Kayan tribe reach for machetes and spears while their dogs leap out and splash up the banks on the scent of a deer.

As the dogs and hunters dart into the thick jungles of Sarawak state on the island of Borneo, 50-year-old Ngajang Midin points to the fresh footprint of a deer in the mud at his feet.

Hanging around outside The Public Theater next week could turn you into an unanticipated actor.

An hour or so before the group known as the Gob Squad hits the stage with its new offering for the Under the Radar Festival, four members will hit the streets armed with video cameras to create their new work, "Super Night Shot."

The London Olympics and Denmark's EU presidency will get a musical salute at the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's concert on January 1, conducted for the second time by the Latvian Mariss Jansons.

Broadcast as every year around the world, the 2012 event will see the return of the Vienna Boys' Choir and, unusually, live performances by the Vienna Ballet, amid the usual Strauss waltzes and polkas.

Saraswati Biswokarma sits in the dark, rearranging the threadbare cotton sheet and straw bed she is forced to sleep on before bringing her knees up to her chest with a shiver.

It is already mid-morning but she has not been allowed out of the airless brick shed where she has spent every night for the past week.

A Japanese businessman has agreed to invest around one million euros ($1.3 million) to restore a 2,000-year-old Roman pyramid in the Italian capital, La Repubblica daily reported on Thursday.

Yuzo Yagi, a fashion business owner from Osaka, is due to sign the agreement later this month and work on the pyramid, which was built in 13 AD as a tomb for Roman magistrate Gaius Cestius is set to start in April, officials said.

The past 12 months has seen a record number of large ivory seizures across the world, confirming a sharp increase in the illegal trade in recent years, a wildlife watchdog said Thursday.

TRAFFIC, which runs the ETIS database of illegal ivory trades, said there had been at least 13 large-scale seizures in 2011, totaling at least 23 tons of ivory -- representing about 2,500 elephants.

Switzerland said Wednesday it had finally finished the process of rehabilitating more than a hundred people punished during WWII for having helped Jews escape Nazi persecution.

But only one of the 137 people vindicated by the report actually lived to see their name cleared.

A court in the Russian city of Tomsk on Wednesday rejected an attempt to ban as "extremist" a translation of a sacred Hindu book, in what was seen as a test case for religious freedoms.

The Siberian court rejected a lawsuit from the Tomsk prosecutor's office to classify a Russian translation of the Hare Krishna edition of the "Bhagavad Gita" as "extremist literature" alongside books like Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf", news agencies reported.