Cuban leader Fidel Castro is publishing two volumes of his autobiographical memoir entitled "Time Guerrilla," the Cuban news media reported Saturday.

The memoirs trace his life from infancy until 1958, when he succeeded in leading a revolution that turned Cuba into a communist country aligned with the Soviet Union.

Iraq has postponed a problem-plagued project for the holy city of Najaf to be the Arab world's Islamic Capital of Culture, the spokesman for Deputy Prime Minister Hussein al-Shahristani said on Friday.

The announcement came after a spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Bashir al-Najafi, one of Iraq's top clerics, said the highest Shiite authority wanted the project postponed because of "financial and administrative corruption."

With flower offerings and drums belting out African rhythms, thousands of people across Brazil paid respects Thursday to Iemanja, the goddess of the sea in the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble.

The Iemanja festival is immensely popular across this vast, racially diverse country of 190 million, but especially in the northeast state of Bahia, the heart of Afro-Brazilian culture.

A copy of the Magna Carta, the English royal manuscript setting out the rights of man, is to be displayed at the U.S. National Archives in Washington from February 17, after a year of restoration work.

The Magna Carta enshrined the rule of law in England at a time of disagreements between King John and the English barons. It was first issued in 1215 and confirmed as English law in 1297.

As the only girl in her noisy classroom of 22 boys, Padma Kanwar Bhatti is one defiant symbol of the toll exacted by India's deadly preference for male children.

Padma, 15, lives with her parents and two elder brothers in Devda, a village of 2,500 residents in the Rajasthan state district of Jaisalmer, which has one of the worst female sex ratios in the country.

The contemporary U.S. artist Mike Kelley, known for his installations and videos, has died aged 57 in California, Los Angeles authorities said on Thursday.

Kelley was found dead in his residence in South Pasadena on Tuesday evening, said LA County coroner's office spokesman Ed Winter.

Vandals have attacked and stolen several statues from the gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome including two works dating back to ancient Rome, the director of the French-owned palace told Agence France Presse on Wednesday.

"I am absolutely shocked by this act of vandalism," Eric de Chassey told AFP, saying that the vandals had come twice last week and again overnight Monday when they were disturbed by a guard.

The American surrealist painter and writer Dorothea Tanning, who was married to the late German painter Max Ernst, died on Tuesday in New York, a spokeswoman said. She was 101.

"It is my sad duty to announce that Dorothea Tanning has passed away. She died peacefully in her home," Pamela Johnson, director of the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Nobel-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska known for her philosophical and often humorously biting turn of phrase, died Wednesday at the age of 88 following a long battle with illness.

A heavy smoker, Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, passed away "peacefully, in her sleep" at her home in Krakow in southern Poland, her assistant Michal Rusinek announced.

An unlikely alliance between the native Moqoit people and leading Argentine scientists has thwarted plans to ship the world's second largest meteorite to Germany as a prestigious art exhibit.

The 37-ton space rock crashed to Earth as part of a meteor shower between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, forming a giant 48,000 square kilometer crater field in northeastern Argentina known as Campo del Cielo, or Field of the Sky.