Royalty rubbed shoulders with the rump of India's caste system at the Jaipur Literary Festival this year as crowds flocked to India's "pink city" for an annual dose of celebrity and culture.

Bright sunshine and a roster of 220 authors and performers, including a clutch of Nobel, Booker and Pulitzer prize winners, lured tens of thousands of book lovers to the grounds of the Diggi Palace -- a converted 19th century mansion where the event has been held since 2006.

Egypt is officially requesting the return of the 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti that has been in a Berlin museum for decades.

The bust, dating back to the 14th century B.C. monarch, tops Egypt's wish list of artifacts the country hopes to bring back as part of a campaign to retrieve thousands of antiquities spirited out during the colonial period and afterward.

China has mandated that all schoolchildren undergo lessons on etiquette -- the latest expression of concern over uncultured manners in one of the world's oldest civilizations.

Teachers will be required to instruct primary school students in the intricacies of basic decorum, respecting elders and proper table manners, according to guidelines posted on the education ministry's website.

India's biggest art fair opens on Friday, pulling in dozens of foreign galleries seeking to tap a new breed of buyers in one of the world's fastest-growing economies.

Now in its third edition, the annual Indian Art Summit has expanded sharply in both size and

A Texas foundation is selling four Henri Matisse sculptures known as "The Backs," which were once displayed in a public park and are currently on exhibit at an art museum in Fort Worth.

The monumental sculptures move from realism to the abstract in depicting, in bronze relief, the back of a nude woman resting her head on her arm. A casting of "Back IV" sold at auction at Christie's in November for 48.8 million dollars.

Peruvian archeologists have discovered the tomb of an ancient pre-Columbian lord buried with gold and silver ornaments in coastal northern Peru, one of the researchers told AFP on Wednesday.

The 1,100-year-old tomb in the Lambayeque region of northern Peru belonged to a noble from the Sican culture, said Carlos Elera, director of the Sican Archeology Project.

In between memorials to two presidents and a stone's throw from a site for World War II soldiers, Washington stands to get a new memorial honoring slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

The 120-million-dollar memorial was still a building site Thursday when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Representative Eleanor Holmes-Norton and Washington Mayor Vincent Gray took an inspection tour to see how construction was progressing on the site, which has been dogged by delays.

Arguably the most widely recognized structure in the world, the Eiffel Tower was designed to stand for only 20 years -- and some predicted it would collapse long before then.

Even as it was being built for the 1889 Universal Exhibition, a professor of mathematics sagely calculated that when the tower was two-thirds complete, its legs would buckle and the whole thing would come tumbling down, crushing workers and houses alike.

Spanish tenor Placido Domingo, who underwent surgery last year to remove cancerous polyp from his colon, Wednesday described performing at his age as a "marvel" as he turns 70 this month.

"To be in Madrid singing, with my family and friends, on such an important day for me is part of my birthday present," he told a news conference ahead of a special birthday performance in the Spanish capital.

Archaeologists said Tuesday they had found the world's oldest known winery in a cave in Armenia, indicating that humans were distilling grapes during the Copper Age, more than 6,000 years ago.

"This is, so far, the oldest relatively complete wine production facility, with its press, fermentation vats and storage jars in situ," said Hans Barnard, the lead author of an article about the study published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Archaeological Science.