Authorities on Sunday opened what they billed as the first Christian cultural center in Iraq in a decade, despite a dramatic decline in the country's once significant Christian population.

The building was inaugurated in the northern city of Kirkuk, home to a diverse population of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, and is to host conferences and meetings to promote inter-faith communications between the city's Muslim and Christian communities.

Stefan Bachmann is only 19, but his darkly mysterious debut novel set in a parallel world of faeries, goblins and child snatchers has already earned him comparisons to J.K. Rowling, Dickens and Dostoyevsky.

"I didn't realize it would get published," Bachmann told Agence France Presse, tapping the yellow, mechanical bird depicted on the cover of "The Peculiar", which first hit shelves in the United States last September.

A Brazilian judge has ordered the erotic trilogy "Fifty Shades of Grey" taken off the shelves of bookstores in the city of Macae, or at least wrapped to prevent minors from opening them.

A statement by the Rio de Janeiro State Judiciary Department says Judge Raphael Queiroz Campos issued the order after he saw children in one of city's bookstores looking through erotic books.

Whether visitors want to try one of the first family's favorite restaurants, discover a sense of history or escape from the crowd to find a museum off the beaten path, Washington is the nation's cultural capital this weekend for inauguration visitors.

The presidential swearing-in on Monday, after all, is only a brief moment in time. So, hundreds of thousands of visitors will be searching for what else to do in a city that has evolved even during the Barack Obama era.

Known mainly for its steelworks, the gritty industrial hub of Kosice in east Slovakia is hard at work reforging itself as a center of creativity and the arts as it enters 2013 with the tag "European Capital of Culture".

A two-day gala blastoff featuring fireworks and gigs by international and local artists this weekend launches a year of metamorphosis with an unprecedented flurry of festivals and events to showcase Slovak film, literature and music.

A long-delayed restoration of the Colosseum's only intact internal passageway has yielded ancient traces of red, black and blue frescoes — as well as graffiti and drawings of phallic symbols — indicating that the arena where gladiators fought was far more colorful than previously thought.

Officials unveiled the discoveries Friday and said the passageway would be open to the public starting this summer, after the €80,000 ($100,000) restoration is completed.

A bomb disposal squad was sent to a Hong Kong hiking trail Friday after a walker found an unexploded World War II-era device near a youth hostel, police said.

Officers evacuated 22 people from the hostel and cordoned off the area after the expatriate hiker discovered the Japanese artillery shell on Mount Davis at the western edge of the Hong Kong island, a police spokeswoman said.

A fire has razed a 250-year-old wooden temple in Japan, police said Friday, at a site that has been a place of worship since the 13th Century.

Tokumanji temple, which sits deep in the mountains of Nagano prefecture was destroyed by the fire, which started late Thursday night, police said.

Hundreds of descendants and supporters of Ned Kelly bade farewell to the infamous Australian bushranger at a requiem mass on Friday, some 132 years after he was executed for killing three policemen.

His memory still divides the nation, with some believing he was a cold-blooded killer, while others see him as a folk hero and symbol of Irish-Australian defiance against British colonial authorities.

A trove of about 4,300 rare vintage advertising posters that were seized and feared to have been destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 will go to auction in New York on Friday.

The collection, which originally belonged to Hans Sachs, a Jewish dentist in Berlin, has been recovered by his son Peter and will be sold at Guernsey's Auction House.