Jason Wu brought the mystery of the Forbidden City to New York fashion week on Friday with a fall-winter collection inspired by his Chinese heritage and 1930s Hollywood glamor.

Born in Taiwan and raised in Canada and the United States, 29-year-old Wu famously designed the gown First Lady Michelle Obama wore to the January 2009 balls that accompanied the inauguration of her husband Barack Obama as president.

A Belgian court refused Friday to ban the sale of "Tintin in the Congo," rejecting arguments by a Congolese man that the iconic comic book was filled with racist stereotypes about Africans.

The Brussels court ruled that Belgian anti-racism laws only apply when there is a willful intention to discriminate against someone, said an attorney for Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, the man who tried to get the strip off bookshelves.

Cuba on Thursday opened its 21st annual international book fair, the high point of the communist nation's cultural calendar, with a new book by former president and revolutionary icon Fidel Castro.

More than 200 foreign writers and intellectuals were to take part in the celebration, which lasts through February 19.

From culture-jamming youths wired into a networked world, to neo-dandies or take-it-slow types, what tomorrow's man will look like -- and what he might want to buy -- is a capital issue for big brands.

Back in 1994 the term "metrosexual", short for "metropolitan heterosexual", was coined to describe an emerging breed of male: urban, single, sophisticated and ready to spend what it takes to look good.

Dark, bare photos of modern Chinese society by Liu Xia, detained wife of China's best known dissident, went on show in New York without her knowledge after they were spirited out of her country.

The photos were brought out of China under the noses of the authorities by French academic, writer and economist Guy Sorman, a friend of the artist and her Nobel Peace prize-winning husbandLiu Xiaobo.

The Chateau de Versailles, the backdrop to "Farewell My Queen" which opened the Berlin film festival Thursday, has long welcomed filmmakers into its grounds, provided they behave themselves.

Sofia Coppola's "Marie-Antoinette" in 2005, with its candy-colored take on courtly life, followed the next year by "Da Vinci Code", have rekindled industry interest in France's rich web of historic settings, chief among them Versailles, which has hosted some 1,000 film, television and documentary shoots since 1940.

The beat is infectious U.S.-style hip hop but the rhymes come straight from the streets of Monrovia, a city which for years has had very little to sing about.

In a sound-proof recording booth in the centre of Liberia's teeming capital, sweat beads on the forehead of 30-year-old Jonathan Koffa -- aka Takun J -- as he spits out a stream of improvised lyrics into a microphone.

A major exhibition of paintings by British artist Lucian Freud, including the final work he painted before his death in July, go on show to the public in London on Thursday.

Prince William's wife Catherine, who studied history of art at university, visited the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery on Wednesday before it opened to the public.

Islamist students halted the filming of an Egyptian television series at Cairo's Ain Shams University protesting against the "indecent “clothing of the actresses, the production company said Thursday.

Misr International films had obtained permission from the university's management to film on site, the head of the company, Gaby Khoury, told Agence France Presse.

The Great Altar of Pergamon, a sculpted frieze dating from the 2nd century BC and one of Berlin's top tourist attractions, will be closed for repair work from 2014, the museum said Tuesday.

The Pergamon Museum -- which opened to house the Ancient Greek masterpiece in 1930 on Berlin's renowned Museum Island -- will undergo a complete renovation in several phases, between October of this year and 2019.