A California law prohibiting mental health providers from counseling gay minors on how to become straight faces its first legal test Friday.

Lawyers for counselors endorsing "reparative therapy" and parents who claim their sons have benefited from it plan to ask a judge to block the first-of-its-kind measure.

The single line of Napoleon's secret code told Paris of his desperate, last order against the Russians: "At three o'clock in the morning, on the 22nd I am going to blow up the Kremlin."

By the time Paris received the letter three days later, the Russian czar's seat of power was in flames and the diminished French army was in retreat. Its elegantly calligraphic ciphers show history's famed general at one of his weakest moments.

Natural wine? Who could possibly object?

With a desire for healthy, sustainable food stimulating trends like the farm to table movement and Slow Food, natural wine is positioning itself as the perfect accompaniment.

Spanish poet and essayist Jose Manuel Caballero Bonald has won the 2012 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor.

Education Minister Jose Ignacio Wert said Thursday the 86-year-old was chosen for the contribution his life-long work has made to enriching Spanish-language literature.

Four Nobel prize winners have joined forces with dozens of artists and writers to demand that access to books be made a priority for disaster relief, once victims' basic needs have been met.

While food, shelter and health will always come first, the petition spearheaded by Libraries Without Borders (LWB) argues that "more attention should be given to nourishing the mind as a second measure to help victims cope with catastrophe and move forward."

An ancient Chinese tower tilting at a perilous angle has earned comparisons with Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa and worried a school in its shadow, state media reported Thursday.

The Wanshou Temple Tower in the central city of Xi'an, which dates from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), began to lean dramatically after a heavy rainstorm in May 2011, state-run China Radio National said.

A Chinese industrialist has bought Chateau Bellefont-Belcier, a leading wine estate in the St Emilion region of Bordeaux, sources involved in the sale said on Thursday.

The property is the first of its status -- Grand Cru Classe (classified growth) -- to fall into Chinese hands.

As Myanmar's censors loosen their grip, one of the country's most acclaimed authors plans to republish her novel about two gay lovers, restoring sex-laced passages once deemed too risque for readers.

Chunks of paragraphs from Nu Nu Yi's 1994 novel "Smile as they bow" were purged by the all-powerful censorship office -- seen as an Orwellian-style arbiter of all that is fit for publication.

A Taiwanese lawmaker's call to scrap a top film festival because it made Taiwan too reliant on China's movie industry sparked heated criticism on Wednesday from film veterans and fans.

The suggestion by opposition lawmaker Kuan Bi-ling came days after the Golden Horse Awards, dubbed the Chinese-language "Oscars", were handed out for the 49th time at a weekend gala in eastern Taiwan.

Twenty-nine storytelling projects from around the world are being showcased from Wednesday in the first-ever Twitter fiction festival, held over five days on the micro-blogging site.

The virtual event, taking place in five languages -- Arabic, English, French, Italian and Spanish -- will run from November 28 to December 2, according to the social network's official blog (blog.twitter.com).