The importance of language in the escalating crisis in Ukraine came to the fore when Russian President Vladimir Putin justified deploying troops in Crimea by saying Moscow needed to protect Russian-speakers there.

Traditionally, the west of the country as well as the capital Kiev has been Ukrainian-speaking, while the east and south -- closer to Russia and including the explosive peninsula of Crimea -- speak Russian.

Human rights groups have questioned the wisdom of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London taking a production of Hamlet to North Korea, but stopped short of calling for the plan to be scrapped.

The Globe will perform the play in the secretive state in September 2015 as part of a global tour marking the 450th anniversary of the English playwright's birth.

Steam rises from a gourd filled with yerba mate as Wissam al-Halabi takes a sip, seated on a Lebanese mountain slope where the South American drink has become a local tradition.

For more than a century, the mountain folk have been enjoying the slightly bitter hot drink, pronounced "yer-bah mah-tay," far from its origins half-way around the world.

Nestled in the Texas high desert about an hour from the Mexican border, Marfa appears, at first glance, to be hidden from the outside world.

With a population of only 1,900, the city that began life as a railroad stop feels like a backwater, with fading buildings, modest homes and dormant streets.

Celaya, an industrial city in the heart of Mexico, now has a Japanese language class where the teacher uses honorifics, addressing her students as "Felipe-san" or "Christian-san."

Across town, a hotel installed a special satellite dish on its rooftop to capture a Japanese TV channel while receptionists greet visitors by saying "konnichiwa" ("hello").

Seven years in the making and costing nearly $20 million, the first Indian film museum is set to open in the home of Bollywood, more than 100 years after the country's celebrated movie industry was born.

The government-funded National Museum of Indian Cinema, set in an elegant 19th century heritage bungalow in south Mumbai, traces Indian cinema's history from the black-and-white silent era to its musical modern blockbusters.

Five minutes. That's all it took to make papal history.

Never has a leader of the Roman Catholic Church become as popular in as short a time as Pope Francis did when he humbly asked the crowd gathered in St Peter's Square on March 13 last year to pray for him.

A riot of color greeted Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme the first time he walked into Haitian Corner, an art gallery around the corner from his Manhattan apartment. Instantly transfixed, he left with a $250 painting by Haitian master Wilson Bigaud. The seed was planted.

Demme's appreciation for work by self-taught Haitian painters like Bigaud and Hector Hyppolite flowered into an obsession that he fed with multiple trips to the cash poor but artistically rich island nation, where he learned Creole and shot two documentaries.

Four centuries after his death, Madrid has decided to finance a search for the remains of Spanish Golden Age writer Miguel de Cervantes, author of the emblematic Don Quixote of la Mancha.

Cervantes was buried in April 1616 in the church of the red-brick Convent of Trinitarians in central Madrid.

Egypt has announced that a team of European archaeologists have found a nearly 2-meter- (6 ½-foot-) tall alabaster statue of a pharoanic princess, dating from approximately 1350 B.C., outside the southern city of Luxor.

Minister of Antiquities Mohammed Ibrahim said in in a statement Friday that the statue was once part of a larger statue that was nearly 14 meters (456 feet) tall and guarded the entrance to a temple.