A Chinese city hopes to cash in on the success of its most famous resident, Nobel Literature Prize winner Mo Yan, by investing millions in a tourist zone dedicated to the writer, Chinese media said Thursday.

Gaomi, a city in eastern China's Shandong province, will invest $107 million in projects to honor Mo Yan, who has set most of his gritty stories of Chinese peasant life in the area, the Beijing News reported.

"Politics is an ugly business," says an official in Chinese author Wang Xiaofang's novel, The Civil Servant's Notebook. "You always need to keep a knife in reserve, even for your own boss."

Delving into the darkness of Chinese bureaucracy, Wang depicts a world of intrigue where those at the top lose sight of their principles in the race for political power.

An unpublished Beethoven manuscript sold for 252,750 euros ($331,000) at auction in Paris, part of a major collection put together over 50 years by the late French-born banker Andre Meyer.

A signed string quartet manuscript by Arnold Schoenberg went for almost as much, 240,750 euros, a record for the Austrian composer who died in 1951, according to Sotheby's auction house.

The organizers of Asia's most prestigious prize for literature said Thursday they were looking for a new sponsor after the Man Group announced it was ending its funding for the prize after six years.

The Man Asian Literary Prize began in 2007 and is given to the best novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English.

A glance at history suggests it's easier for a Chinese woman to orbit Earth than to land a spot on the highest rung of Chinese politics.

In June, a 33-year-old air force major marked a major feminist milestone by becoming the first Chinese woman to travel in space. With a once-a-decade leadership transition set to kick off Nov. 8, many now are waiting to see if another ambitious Chinese female, State Councilor Liu Yandong, can win one of the nine spots at the apex of Chinese power.

The French government Tuesday moved to block a budget amendment introducing a wealth tax on artworks, following a storm of protest from top museums including the Louvre and the Pompidou Centre.

"The government's position is quite clear. Artworks will not be included in the assets liable for wealth taxation," Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told Europe 1 radio, after art world heavyweights sounded the alarm.

Seven paintings by artists including Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet were stolen from a museum in Rotterdam in an early-hours heist, Dutch police said Tuesday.

The theft at the Kunsthal museum is one of the largest in years in the Netherlands, and is a stunning blow for the private Triton Foundation collection, which was being exhibited publicly as a group for the first time.

He was in power during India's worst religious riots since independence and remains a hate figure for many of the country's Muslims.

But Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat state, insists his region is now a role model for the rest of India as he positions himself for a widely expected tilt at the premiership.

Pope John Paul I, who reigned for just 33 days in 1978 before dying of a heart attack, was definitely not poisoned, the prelate advocating for sainthood for the late pontiff said on Tuesday.

Monsignor Enrico dal Covolo said in an interview with the TGCOM blog that the documents and 167 testimonies he had collected for a report to be submitted to the Vatican on Wednesday dismissed "any suspicion of a murder" of the pope.

President Dilma Rousseff wants to introduce public service quotas for black Brazilians as a way to repay a historic debt for centuries of slavery and discrimination, a government source said Monday.

The official told AFP that the government is considering adopting a quota system for new public service contracts and exams to benefit Afro-Brazilians, who make up the country's majority but remain at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.