It's the drink that, more than any lover, drove a generation of artists, from Van Gogh to Oscar Wilde and Verlaine, to distraction. 

Absinthe was their muse, their creative rocket fuel, but the fabled "fee verte" (green fairy), which they venerated in painting and prose, was also their ruin. That was the theory, at least, when France banned the green-tinted liquor during World War 1, claiming it drove drinkers insane.

Sheep or goat?

China's coming lunar new year has stirred a debate over which zodiac creature is the correct one -- but Chinese folklorists dismiss the fixation on animals as missing the point.

Hard-to-pronounce British place names are getting a Mandarin makeover with sometimes surprising results, Britain's tourism agency said on Monday as part of a campaign to encourage more Chinese tourists.

VisitBritain released 101 new suggested names for famous landmarks provided by the Chinese public through online polling on social media.

Forty years after the end of the Vietnam war, U.S. bombs dropped along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos have become expensive jewelry worn by American fashionistas.

Delicate bracelets encrusted with diamonds, bronze pendants, necklaces and drop earrings -- all made from ordnance left over from America's deadliest war -- are on display on the sidelines of New York Fashion Week.

When she sways to the sensual beat of samba, Megumi Kudo also heals the wounds in her mother's heart from a huge earthquake that shattered their home city in Japan 20 years ago.

This year's festive menu for the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro has special poignancy for the Kudos, with daughter Megumi set to perform as a "passista" dancer with the famed Salgueiro school this weekend, continuing a tradition that has now spanned two generations.

The Mumbai neighborhood made famous by the film "Slumdog Millionaire" is set to host its first "biennale", aiming to promote health through creativity, although it will be very different to some of the world's grander art fairs.

The three-week festival, opening Sunday, will showcase works created by residents of Dharavi, the densely populated settlement in the heart of India's financial capital that is known as one of Asia's biggest slums.

Secular Turks opposed to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday boycotted schools and took to the streets to demand a secular education and denounce a claimed creeping Islamisation of the schools system.

The protests were led by Turkey's largest religious minority the Alevis, who adhere to an offshoot of Shia Islam, as well as leading education union Egitim Sen.

Indonesia's top Islamic clerical body threatened Friday to issue a fatwa against the sale of condoms following reports that the contraceptives were being sold together with chocolate to mark Valentine's Day.

Pictures of chocolate bars packaged with condoms have been published in newspapers and circulated on social media in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country in recent days.

Uzbekistan is urging young people to shun "alien" Valentine's Day traditions such as sending cards, saying they should instead enjoy the love poetry of a 15th-century warrior-prince.

The Central Asian country has turned February 14 into "national poetry day," as the government attempts to combat what it calls the "pernicious influence" of Western mass culture.

China should roll back its one-child policy and instead mandate that all couples have two children, a family planning official has said, drawing criticism Friday from a ruling Communist Party newspaper.

Mei Zhiqiang, deputy director the Family Planning Commission of Shanxi province, offered the recommendation earlier this week as a way to solve the country's increasingly problematic gender imbalance.