First went the fancy banquets, then the lavish gift-giving. Now, China's ruling Communist Party has set its sights on a new target in its anti-corruption drive: art and literary prizes.

China's proliferation of cultural awards has raised alarm among the party's much-feared anti-corruption investigators, who worry that government officials are using them as a means of improving their clout, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

A French artist has completely covered a derelict Los Angeles motel -- palm trees and all -- with a dazzling coat of white paint to create an enormous, ghostly artwork.

Called "Projections," the piece by Vincent Lamouroux was publicly unveiled Sunday in LA's trendy Silver Lake neighborhood, and instantly became a local attraction, with fascinated passersby stopping to snap images of the motel.

As he smooths a gold plaque on the glistening flank of Myanmar's most prestigious Buddhist pagoda, a merchant pays his ancestors the highest honour -- and contributes to a bumper year of donations to re-gild the sacred site.

The Shwedagon Pagoda, which rises in a stately conical tower above downtown Yangon, has been at the heart of Buddhism in Myanmar for hundreds of years, as well as providing a luminous arena for political resistance in the former junta-run nation's more recent turbulent history. 

New Zealanders turned out in record numbers at dawn services on Saturday to honour their war dead in emotional tributes on the 100th anniversary of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign.

Tens of thousands of people gathered at war memorials around the country for services, which will also be held in Australia and Turkey, to mark the landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) on Turkish soil on April 25, 1915.

An exhibition teaming works by British artist Tracey Emin -- many of them new -- and Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, who died aged 28 in 1918, opened in Vienna on Friday.

The show at the city's Leopold Museum incorporates around 50 of Emin's often highly sexualised works alongside around 15 similar, if tamer, drawings and poems by Schiele.

In the face of strong competition from China, the traditional, locally produced Palestinian headscarf has put up a show of resistance, successfully pulling itself back from the brink of extinction.

Thanks to the business sense of two brothers from the southern West Bank city of Hebron, the traditional black-and-white keffiyeh headscarf has discovered a new lease of life.

When Tank 390 crashed through the gates of Saigon's presidential palace 40 years ago, it heralded the end of Vietnam's war. But the men who manned it have since lived in obscurity, poor yet forever bonded by the history they created.

On April 30, 1975, the four-man tank team had come under heavy fire and lost contact with their commanders as they entered central Saigon during a lightning-fast offensive by communist forces from the North.

Korean Lee Yong-Soo was forced into sexual slavery serving Japan's imperial army. Seventy years later, with Japan's prime minister preparing a historic address to U.S. Congress, she demands just one thing: an apology.

"I'm not going to die until we resolve this issue," the diminutive 87 year old told reporters in the U.S. Capitol.

An overhaul of Morocco's penal code has triggered a lively debate on morality in the conservative North African nation, where homosexuality and sexual relations outside marriage are forbidden.

But calls to legalize extra-marital sex or abolish the death penalty appear to be a step too far for authorities in the country, where Islam is the state religion.

The United States returned Wednesday dozens of ancient artifacts that had been smuggled out of Egypt by an international criminal network, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said.

The items -- including a Greco-Roman style Egyptian sarcophagus discovered in a Brooklyn garage in 2009 -- were handed back to the Egyptian government at a ceremony in Washington.