The opera glasses Abraham Lincoln held when he was fatally shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865 are on the auction block.

Lincoln carried the opera glasses to a showing of the play "Our American Cousin" when John Wilkes Booth burst into the president's theater box and shot him in the head with a pistol at close range.

The intense relationship between Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and Ambroise Vollard, one of the great art dealers of the 20th century, is at the heart of an exhibition on Venice's Grand Canal.

Vollard -- who championed many of the upcoming artists of his day including Cezanne, Van Gogh and Renoir -- is credited with discovering and befriending the young Picasso and commissioning some of his most striking etchings.

The first major U.S. retrospective of Chinese artist Wu Guanzhong opens Wednesday in New York, fulfilling the painter's dying wish to be better known in the West -- and signaling the continued rise of Chinese art on the international stage.

Wu, whose 1919-2010 life spanned nearly all of China's tumultuous 20th century and rise as a world power in the 21st, had previously been shown in Europe but never in a serious way in the United States.

The acclaimed composer and pianist Fazil Say said Monday that he was turning his back on his native Turkey and would live in exile in Japan after becoming disillusioned by the rise of conservative Islam.

In an interview with the Hurriyet daily, Say spoke of how he felt completely ostracized by Turkish society since he declared that he was an atheist and that the criticism he had received had highlighted a growing culture of intolerance.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra directed by Italian maestro Riccardo Muti begins a tour of Italy in Rome on Monday with a concert of music by Richard Strauss, Dmitry Shostakovich and Nino Rota.

The award-winning orchestra is widely regarded as one of the best in the world and received critical acclaim on its tour of Russia earlier this month.

Romania's new National Library opened its doors Monday in a monumental building in the capital city, more than 20 years after its foundations were laid under the communist regime.

"This is a superb transformation of grey, communist-era ruins," Prime Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu said during the opening ceremony.

"Please Look after Mom", a novel of family love and loss by award-winning author Kyung-Sook Shin, has sold more than two million copies in her homeland South Korea, the publisher said Tuesday.

Lee Sang-Sul, director at publisher Changbi, said only two other novels since the 1990s had sold more than two million in South Korea, "so it's a rare achievement for a pure literary work".

Some 270 ships pass each week through the Panama Canal, but one now gives tourists the chance to experience the storied waterway on the "Islamorada," Al Capone's legendary rum-runner.

The wooden ship, famous for smuggling liquor for the U.S. mobster during the prohibition era, turned 100 this year and has been refurbished for guided tours of the canal's locks and shoreline wildlife.

"One Day on Earth" -- touted as the first film with footage from every country taken on the same day -- was to be screened for the first time Sunday around the world, including at the U.N.

Organizers say the documentary, to be shown at the United Nations General Assembly and in more than 160 countries, addresses issues such as cultural diversity, environmental waste, extreme poverty and the status of women.

African designers are fast re-defining styles emerging from the continent as they defy stereotypes and move beyond outsiders' cliched ideas of how Africans dress.

Without abandoning their roots, designers have long embraced a range of new ideas and continue to expand; spreading their influence globally while staying in sync with evolving tastes back home.