Murders, fires, traffic accidents, mafia encounters: this was the world of eccentric New York photographer Arthur "Weegee" Fellig now brought back to life in a new exhibit.

"As a photographer, Weegee is perhaps the truest, most perceptive, most cynical, and yet blatantly sentimental chronicler of urban life in 20th century New York," the International Center of Photography said, presenting the exhibit "Murder is my Business."

One of India's prime tourist attractions, the princely forts and palaces of Rajasthan state, are hoping for a new lease on life -- literally.

More than two million domestic and foreign tourists visit Rajasthan every year for a glimpse of the state's royal past and to experience the architectural legacy of kingdoms that lost their identity when India became a republic.

Spain's government said Wednesday it has invited Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa to head the Cervantes Institute, which is charged with promoting Spanish language and culture worldwide.

Madrid would like the Peruvian-Spanish author to occupy the new post of president of the institution, which would involve representing it throughout the world, Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said.

An international group seeking to preserve the legacy of Winston Churchill is announcing plans Thursday to create the first U.S. research center devoted to the longtime British leader.

The new National Churchill Library and Center will be established between 2013 and 2015 at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., with an $8 million (€6.23 million) pledge from the Chicago-based Churchill Centre.

NBA all-time scoring leader Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a legendary retired center, was named a global cultural ambassador on Wednesday by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Abdul-Jabbar, born Lew Alcindor before changing his name after leading Milwaukee to the 1971 NBA title, scored 38,387 points in 1,560 games over a 20-year NBA career and was named the NBA Most Valuable Player in 1971 and 1985.

Twenty years after the USSR collapsed, Georgia's fervently pro-Western government regards the Soviet Union as a repressive dictatorship and has been trying to erase its legacy.

But perhaps inconveniently for the administration of President Mikheil Saakashvili, the USSR's most notorious leader Joseph Stalin was born as Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in the provincial Georgian town of Gori.

Britain's greatest living artist, David Hockney, has swapped the Californian sunshine for the landscape of his native Yorkshire for a blockbuster exhibition which goes on show this week.

Hockney has portrayed country lanes and hedgerows in a riot of color that leaps off the wall at the Royal Academy of Arts, a short walk from Piccadilly Circus in London.

Historians have cheered news that Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" will be reprinted in Germany for the first time since the Nazi dictator's fall in 1945, just as Holocaust survivors hit out at the move.

British publisher Peter McGee said he would put out excerpts from the anti-Semitic manifesto, which laid out the Fuehrer's vision long before he took power in 1933, alongside commentary putting the work in historical context.

Available for rent: The Acropolis.

In a move bound to leave many Greeks and scholars aghast, Greece's culture ministry said Tuesday it will open up some of the debt-stricken country's most-cherished archaeological sites to advertising firms and other ventures.

British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.

Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said Tuesday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, drafty British Geological Survey.