Four Nobel prize winners have joined forces with dozens of artists and writers to demand that access to books be made a priority for disaster relief, once victims' basic needs have been met.

While food, shelter and health will always come first, the petition spearheaded by Libraries Without Borders (LWB) argues that "more attention should be given to nourishing the mind as a second measure to help victims cope with catastrophe and move forward."

An ancient Chinese tower tilting at a perilous angle has earned comparisons with Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa and worried a school in its shadow, state media reported Thursday.

The Wanshou Temple Tower in the central city of Xi'an, which dates from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), began to lean dramatically after a heavy rainstorm in May 2011, state-run China Radio National said.

A Chinese industrialist has bought Chateau Bellefont-Belcier, a leading wine estate in the St Emilion region of Bordeaux, sources involved in the sale said on Thursday.

The property is the first of its status -- Grand Cru Classe (classified growth) -- to fall into Chinese hands.

As Myanmar's censors loosen their grip, one of the country's most acclaimed authors plans to republish her novel about two gay lovers, restoring sex-laced passages once deemed too risque for readers.

Chunks of paragraphs from Nu Nu Yi's 1994 novel "Smile as they bow" were purged by the all-powerful censorship office -- seen as an Orwellian-style arbiter of all that is fit for publication.

A Taiwanese lawmaker's call to scrap a top film festival because it made Taiwan too reliant on China's movie industry sparked heated criticism on Wednesday from film veterans and fans.

The suggestion by opposition lawmaker Kuan Bi-ling came days after the Golden Horse Awards, dubbed the Chinese-language "Oscars", were handed out for the 49th time at a weekend gala in eastern Taiwan.

Twenty-nine storytelling projects from around the world are being showcased from Wednesday in the first-ever Twitter fiction festival, held over five days on the micro-blogging site.

The virtual event, taking place in five languages -- Arabic, English, French, Italian and Spanish -- will run from November 28 to December 2, according to the social network's official blog (blog.twitter.com).

Italian conductor Riccardo Muti on Tuesday opens the new season at Rome Opera devoted to Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner with a performance of "Simon Boccanegra" by the great Italian Romantic composer.

Muti emphasized Verdi's "greatness and universality" in a speech to students at Rome's La Sapienza University on the eve of the premiere at an opera house where he has been appointed "honorary conductor for life".

Shakespeare's Globe theater in London unveiled plans Tuesday for a neighboring indoor venue which will stage candlelit plays.

Developers hope the 340-seat theater will be the world's most complete recreation of an indoor Jacobean theater and aim to stage the first public performances in January 2014.

Full of flying carpets, genies, love and battle, a Paris show opening Tuesday lifts the curtain on "One Thousand and One Nights", exploring the roots of the folk tales and their powerful influence in the West.

Through some 350 manuscripts, artworks, artefacts and film clips, the show at the Arab World Institute traces the tales' journey from their origin in Indian and Persian folkore, to their translation into Arabic in the eighth century.

Lost for decades before their chance discovery by a U.S. official, the raw transcripts of the Bretton Woods conference reveal the difficult birth of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in 1944.

"I was looking in the Treasury library for some other material which was nearby and I noticed that there's a section labeled uncatalogued material... and so I was curious to see what was in it," Kurt Schuler, a U.S. Treasury economist, told Agence France Presse.