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.

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.