The Indian rupee's crash has swept away banker Nupur Sood's dream of a holiday in Venice: instead the 35-year-old will settle for cold beers on the beaches of Goa on India's west coast. "We are pampering ourselves with a leisurely holiday but it will be domestic. I guess it is the only way to compensate," said Sood, who plans to stay next month at the plush Grand Hyatt hotel in Goa, managed by Hyatt Hotels Corp, as a consolation for missing her holiday of a lifetime in Italy.

Describing himself as an “accidental photographer,” Edwin Koo is an award-winning Singaporean documentary photographer who produces work that is striking and evocative. So much so that his body of work on Swat, Pakistan, titled Paradise Lost: Pakistan’s Swat Valley, won him the Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography in 2010.

Vladimir Putin doesn’t mind posing for shirtless photos — but paint the Russian president in drag, and you’ve apparently gone too far. Russian police seized a portrait depicting Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev wearing women’s lingerie from the Museum of Power in St. Petersburg and shut the gallery down. According to the Associated Press, the artist, Konstantin Altunin, has fled the country.

Last week the Journal de Montreal dropped a bomb on Quebec’s extremely shaky sense of identity by publishing leaked details from the upcoming Charter of Quebec Values set to be released in the fall. Apparently, the government plans to ban employees of public institutions like schools, hospitals and daycares from wearing religious symbols such as turbans, hijabs, kippas, crucifixes, or anything else “conspicuously religious.”

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, and of Dr. King’s pivotal “I Have a Dream” speech, an event that will be commemorated later on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in the very same spot where Dr. King spoke. Staff at the British Embassy are honoured to join people from across the globe in marking the anniversary. As we reflect on this historic occasion, we look at some of the connections between Dr. King’s work and the UK

Eleven years after a joint Washington-Baltimore bid to host the Summer Olympics was snubbed, a group based in the nation’s capital announced Tuesday its interest in trying again. This time, the initiative doesn’t formally include Baltimore, though preliminary plans call for staging events in Maryland’s largest city, as well as Northern Virginia and the District.

A street artist is dedicated to repainting the graffiti daubed by street-gang members around his Chicago neighborhood, transforming the vandalized walls into naturalistic landscapes, comic-strip characters and historical figures of the United States and Mexico.