Fifty years after the Cuban missile crisis, Havana remains virulently hostile to the United States, which reciprocates by maintaining a crippling economic embargo against the communist-ruled island.

Despite the passage of time, official speeches from the Castro regime and state-controlled media still refer to the superpower 90 miles (145 kilometers) across the Florida Strait as "the enemy" or "the Northern empire."

Once a sign of Iraq's cultural revival after decades of conflict, the Baghdad International Film Festival ended on a sour note Sunday with complaints of poor organisation and a lack of funds.

Several prominent directors were absent, there was a palpable lack of resources, and obvious disinterest from the government as the five-day festival drew to a close on Sunday night.

The largest exhibition of modern Aboriginal paintings ever to go on display outside of Australia opens Tuesday at the Quai Branly Museum in the heart of Paris.

"The Sources of Aborigine Painting" features more than 200 works of art, and decorated artifacts, like shields, from which the abstract painting style derives.

London's Tate Modern was temporarily closed on Sunday after a mural by U.S. modern artist Mark Rothko was defaced by black paint, the gallery said.

The gallery shut for a short time at around 3.25pm (1425 GMT) after the damage was found on the corner of one of the Rothko's Seagram murals.

A massive crowd that organizers said topped a million took part Sunday in a pilgrimage to Lujan, one of Argentina's key symbols of its majority Roman Catholic faith.

"Today, we have come to ask for something: for her to teach us to work for justice," Buenos Aires Archbishop Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio said at a mass outside the cathedral in Lujan, home of a celebrated icon of the Virgin Mary.

Sweden's tradition of gender equality has famously put more mums in the workplace while rising numbers of dads stay at home.

Now advocates have a new frontier: they're pushing for a gender-neutral pronoun, "hen", to be added to "han" (he) and "hon" (she).

Sotheby's said on Monday it has canceled the sale of a Chinese painting by a top-selling artist at its auction in Hong Kong, after its ownership was challenged by a Taiwanese Buddhist nun.

The 1950 painting, "Riding in the Autumn Countryside" by Zhang Daqian, was expected to fetch up to $1.6 million at Monday's fine Chinese paintings sale, where 325 art works valued at up to $22 million will go under the hammer.

Hungarian prosecutors brought a new charge of "complicity in criminal acts" on Friday against Bela Biszku, a former communist leader under investigation for alleged war crimes in the aftermath of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising in Budapest.

"In March 1957, at a time when Bela Biszku was interior minister, policemen severely beat three members of the Hungarian Academy of Science who had taken part in the events of 1956," the Prosecution Office in Budapest said in a statement.

Bulgaria, which has prided itself as being the only ally of Nazi Germany to save its 48,000 Jews from death camps, must now admit it allowed the killing of 11,000 Jews from territories under its control, researchers say.

"You are a hero rescuer but also a brutal murderer and a cool persecutor. You cannot say the one without saying the other too," Michael Berenbaum, founder of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, told a conference Friday in Sofia aimed at shedding light on this sombre page of Bulgaria's history.

Fascinated by contraception, chimney sweeps, or magic boxes? Vienna has a museum for you.

The city may be better known for its grand art collections, but it is filled with quirky or downright bizarre establishments, and Museum Night is their chance to shine.