Myanmar may be best known for its decades of junta rule, but behind the bamboo curtain maverick entrepreneurs have toiled for years to put the nation on the map for the quality of its wine.

Vines cascade down terraces overlooking the vast mirror of Inle Lake in northeastern Myanmar, an unlikely setting for a budding wine industry tempting the tastebuds of tourists now flocking to the country as it opens up.

The U.N. cultural organization UNESCO on Wednesday said it would send a mission to the historic city of Timbuktu in war-torn Mali as soon as possible to assess the damage done to ancient cultural sites.

"UNESCO will send a mission, as soon as security permits, to undertake a complete evaluation of the damage and determine the most urgent needs, in order to finalize a plan of action... that will guide reconstruction and rehabilitation," the body's director general Irina Bokova said in a statement.

The Spanish leader of a sect in Mexico who saw himself as the reincarnation of Christ is being investigated over claims children were forced into sex, an official said Wednesday.

Mexican authorities broke up the cult, Defenders of Christ, during a raid Saturday on a house near the U.S. border in Nuevo Laredo city, where 14 foreigners, including Spaniard Ignacio Gonzalez de Arriba, and 10 Mexicans were found last week.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi insisted in Berlin on Wednesday he had nothing against Judaism and that comments on Israel attributed to him before he was elected had been "taken out of context".

Speaking through an interpreter at a joint press conference after talks in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he said, as a Muslim, his faith compelled him to respect religions.

A rare collection of letters between Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi and a South African bodybuilder with whom he shared a close relationship went on display in New Delhi on Wednesday.

The bond between Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach has been a subject of speculation and gossip for years owing to their closeness, with previously published correspondence suggesting they may have had a physical relationship.

Singapore said Wednesday it has rejected plans by South Korean activists to erect a statue in the city-state commemorating women forced into sexual slavery by Japan during World War II.

The culture ministry denied claims by the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery that there had been talks about plans to put up such a statue.

Romanian police investigating the spectacular October theft of seven masterpieces from a Rotterdam museum searched the home of a fashion designer on Monday and arrested his assistant, a police source said.

They searched the home of Catalin Botezatu and were also "interrogating him in the framework of the inquiry," the source said.

A new Chinese translation of "Finnegans Wake", renowned for its linguistic difficulty in the original, is proving a hit in China -- although one academic called the author James Joyce "mentally ill".

The first-ever mainland Chinese edition of the novel sold out its initial print run of 8,000 copies just three weeks after being launched in December, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Evangelical churches are blooming in Angola, a traditionally devout Catholic nation, as its impoverished people turn to the promises of proselytism and Protestantism.

In a country of about 19 million people, Pope Benedict XVI drew a crowd of one million faithful when he visited the former Portuguese colony in 2009, and three in five Angolans belong to the faith.

The Fendi fashion house is financing a €2.18 million ($2.93 million) restoration of the Trevi Fountain in Rome, famed as a setting for the film "La Dolce Vita" and the place where dreamers leave their coins.

The 20-month project on one of the city's most iconic fountains was unveiled at a city hall press conference Monday featuring Fendi designers Karl Lagerfeld and Silvia Venturini Fendi, who said the project combined a love of Rome's past with a need to preserve its future.