The Dalai Lama is set to headline India's Jaipur Literature Festival to speak about faith with one of his biographers, Pico Iyer.

The Tibetan spiritual leader will hold a session on the festival's first day, Thursday, titled: "Kinships of Faiths: Finding the Middle Way."

Eighty years after Adolf Hitler's rise to power, a novel that imagines his return to modern-day Berlin has become a bestseller in Germany, though a comedy about the Fuehrer is not to everyone's taste.

Instead of committing suicide in his bunker on April 30, 1945, in "He's Back" (Er Ist Wieder Da), Hitler wakes up in 2011 without the slightest idea what has happened in the intervening 66 years.

A U.S. federal court handed down prison terms Tuesday to an American man and a Mexican woman for trying to sell a $3 million Henri Matisse painting stolen from a Venezuelan museum.

Pedro Antonio Marcuello Guzman, a 46-year-old resident of Miami, was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison, while 50-year-old Maria Martha Elisa Ornelas Lazo of Mexico City got one year and nine months.

Syrians on both sides of the conflict must take steps to protect the country's rich historical and archeological heritage stretching back thousands of years, a top U.S. official warned Tuesday.

"We are always concerned in situations like this. And we've seen it in other areas of conflict, whether it was in Afghanistan, or in Iraq," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

An official says Nepal's government will begin issuing citizenship certificates with the category "third gender" for people who do not wish to be identified as male or female.

Activists hailed the decision, saying it was an achievement for gay and transgender rights.

An exhibition of the largest collection of modern Aboriginal paintings to have gone on display outside of Australia has been a major hit with art lovers in Paris.

The exhibition, "The Sources of Aborigine Painting", drew 133,716 visitors to the Quai Branly Museum in the space of just over three months, making it the 5th most popular exhibition the center has hosted.

China has agreed to lend art exhibits for a major joint exhibition in Taipei, the head of Taiwan's top museum said Sunday, as the two former rivals push ahead with detente.

Feng Ming-chu, director of Taipei's National Palace Museum, will fly to Beijing on Monday, the first such trip since 2009 when the chiefs of the museum and of Beijing's Palace Museum made landmark exchange visits.

Japanese poet Toyo Shibata, who started writing at the age of 92 and whose first anthology sold almost 1.6 million copies, died Sunday aged 101, her son said.

Shibata died at a nursing home near her residence in Utsunomiya north of Tokyo, said her eldest son Kenichi Shibata. She had been in the home periodically since her health worsened last month.

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.