From vintage sardine tins and embroidered napkins to artisanal soaps - Portugal's retro products are winning new fans as a handful of companies introduce their old-school aesthetic to the international market.

"The Americans have McDonald's -- we've got tinned fish", jokes Tiago Cabral Ferreira at the Conserveira de Lisboa shop which has sold sardines, mackerel and other canned fish from the heart of Lisbon's old town for the past 83 years.

Palestinian officials on Thursday joined a ceremony to lay the cornerstone for a new museum of Palestinian culture, history and society in Bir Zeit near Ramallah.

Organizers said the museum would provide Palestinians with "a valuable source of information on Palestine and its history".

France is marking the 70th anniversary of the world-loved "The Little Prince" with a host of special editions, including a new biography of its author, native son Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

"Le Petit Prince", a series of parables in which a boy prince recounts his adventures among the stars to a downed pilot on Earth, was first published in New York in 1943, in English and French.

In Iraq's national museum, home to some of the world's most precious artifacts of ancient Mesopotamia, a caption beside a skeleton simply reads in English: "dated to very old time."

And some of the museum's most impressive pieces carry no labels at all — like a giant stone head lying on the ground that may or may not belong on a nearby empty pedestal labeled "Assyrian King Nimrod," the Biblical tormentor of the patriarch Abraham.

Uruguay's legislature voted Wednesday to allow same-sex marriages nationwide, making it only the second Latin American country to do so.

The vote, with 71 of the 92 members of the lower house backing the measure, was welcomed with cries of "freedom, freedom" and "equality" from members of the public who burst into applause.

The wait is nearly over for thousands of readers eager to get their hands on the new novel by celebrated Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.

At least one major bookstore in Tokyo is flinging open its doors at midnight to cater to the demands of the most dedicated fans of the surrealist, craving their latest fix of one of modern literature's most talked-about authors.

Paris's Louvre museum was closed on Wednesday due to a walkout by some staff over a rise in aggressive pickpockets including children sometimes working in gangs of up to 30, staff and management said.

Disappointed tourists waited in vain in front of the famed museum, home to works of art such as the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo, which receives some 10 million visitors a year.

Cosmetics billionaire Leonard Lauder has given New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art an astonishing, no-strings-attached collection of Cubist art that he assembled over four decades, the museum announced Tuesday.

The enormous gift, estimated to be worth $1 billion, includes 78 works by Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Leger, and "will transform the museum," a statement said.

For a Shakespeare play with a twist, a Polish arts troupe cast inmates alongside professional actors in an effort to engage those on the sidelines of society.

The six men, whose crimes range from theft to battery resulting in death, performed their adaptation of the bard's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Warsaw's posh Polish Theater last weekend.

Tears roll down Heitaro Matsumoto's face as the 72-year-old businessman talks of an uncle who died on Guam as a Japanese soldier in the hopeless final weeks of World War II.

The remains of Goro Matsumoto, in his mid-20s at the time of his death, have never been recovered. Nor have those of 18,000 other Japanese soldiers who died on the island, now a tropical vacation spot for Japanese tourists.