Local officials aiming to transform Rio de Janeiro from a cultural backwater into an art hotspot are bolstering their campaign with this week's opening of a museum built around one of the world's premier collections of contemporary Latin American art.

Casa Daros, a 12,000-square-meter (129,000-square-foot) space in an impeccably renovated 1866 mansion, will house some of the works acquired the past 13 years by Zurich-based collector Ruth Schmidheiny. Working with German curator Hans-Michael Herzog, she combed Latin America at a time when the art world paid little attention to the region. The 1,200 pieces they bought came from 117 artists, most of them still alive and working.

Despite their longstanding wish for a single homeland called Kurdistan, the Kurds are today scattered over four countries spanning half a million square kilometers: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

Originally of Indo-European origin, the Kurds trace their roots back to the Medes of ancient Persia. Mainly Sunni Muslim, they live in mountainous regions straddling the four countries, and have kept their language, culture and tribal system.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has launched a new initiative to commission works by contemporary Chinese artists.

The new program is made possible by a $10 million grant from the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation. It will enable the museum to commission works by artists born in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong or Macau.

A documentary on Egyptian Jews that had been blocked by the country's security service will screen in theaters at the end of the month, the film's director said on Wednesday.

"Jews of Egypt on the 27th of March in movie theaters. We won the war against National Security. We got the permit," wrote the director, Amir Ramses, on his Twitter and Facebook accounts.

A $3 tag sale buy has turned into a massive windfall for the lucky bargain hunter: the Chinese bowl sold for $2.23 million at an auction at Sotheby's on Tuesday.

The small pottery bowl, finely crafted with an ivory glaze, turned out to be a thousand year old "Ding" bowl, dating from the Song dynasty, which ruled China from 960 to 1279.

Stunning reproductions of the famed cave paintings of Lascaux are being displayed for the first time outside of France at an exhibit in Chicago opening Wednesday.

Meticulously copied to the millimeter, these full-sized replicas are one of the only way to see these images, since the cave was closed to the public in 1963 in order to preserve the ancient masterpieces.

France on Monday vowed to step up efforts to return works of art stolen from Jews by the Nazis to the families of their rightful owners.

The pledge came on the eve of an official ceremony at which six 18th-century paintings will be returned to the descendants of Vienna-based industrialist Richard Neumann and another 17th-century work handed over to the family of Josef Wiener, a Prague banker who perished in the holocaust.

A painting donated to Britain's National Trust by the estate of a wealthy supporter has been identified as a Rembrandt self-portrait worth 20 million pounds ($30 million), the heritage body said Monday.

The painting was given to the trust in 2010 by the estate of Edna, Lady Samuel of Wych Cross, whose property-developer husband was a major collector of Dutch and Flemish art. It hangs in Buckland Abbey in southwest England, the former home of 16th-century seafarer Francis Drake.

Many Brazilians cast their country as racial democracy where people of different groups long have intermarried, resulting in a large mixed-race population. But you need only turn on the TV, open the newspaper or stroll down the street to see clear evidence of segregation.

In Brazil, whites are at the top of the social pyramid, dominating professions of wealth, prestige and power. Dark-skinned people are at the bottom of the heap, left to clean up after others and take care of their children and the elderly.

Forget what you think you know about America's stiff and stodgy capital city.

Beyond the staid suits and ties of Washington's politicians, lobbyists and lawyers lies the "other DC" -- an underground cultural scene of graffiti, go-go and hardcore punk music that took off in the 1980s and still pulsates today.