The Musee d'Orsay will on Friday open a major exhibition of paintings from the 19th century at the new modern art museum in China's commercial hub of Shanghai, museum officials said Wednesday.

Many of the 87 paintings by artists in the French Naturalism movement, including works by Gustave Courbet and Jean-Francois Millet, are being shown in China for the first time, exhibition organizers told a news conference.

Christie's auctioned off the Archduke Joseph Diamond for nearly $21.5 million Tuesday night, a world auction record price per carat for a colorless diamond.

The Archduke Joseph Diamond was the first of two out-of-this world diamonds being auctioned off this week in Geneva. Sotheby's on Wednesday will auction what it calls an exceptionally rare fancy deep blue briolette diamond of 10.48 carats expected to get up to $4.5 million.

An informer's tip led South African police to a private cemetery Tuesday where they found four paintings hundreds of miles away from where they had been stolen from a museum in the capital, authorities said.

The tip is the latest twist in a heist that saw $2 million worth of art stolen Sunday from the Pretoria ArtMuseum by pistol-wielding thieves posing as eager students with their teacher. One oil painting of a South African township streetscape by artist Gerard Sekoto remains missing.

As Homer noted, the Trojans love nothing better than a good braai after fending off Achilles and his horde of assegai-wielding Greek impi.

Well, that is according to one retired classics professor who has spent more than 10 years putting Homer's epic poem about the Trojan war into a South African context.

Turkey's ruling party submitted a bill to parliament Tuesday to allow court testimonies to be given in the Kurdish language, one of the demands raised by hundreds of hunger strikers nationwide.

"A detainee, if he likes, may use another language (than Turkish) to defend himself against charges brought against him in the court," according to the bill proposed by the Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP).

In a poor but fertile corner of southern Morocco, illiterate Berber women are tapping the surge in global demand for argan oil, a "miracle" product they grind from a special nut, that is helping to lift them out of poverty.

Sometimes known as "liquid gold" or "miracle oil" for its rich cosmetic, culinary and medicinal properties, the exclusively Moroccan export has caused a sensation in the West, where it is touted as a unique hair care and anti-aging skin potion.

As Gyani Maiya Sen nears the end of her life she worries that her final words may the last ever spoken in her mysterious mother tongue.

The 76-year-old, part of a vanishing tribe in remote western Nepal, is the only surviving native speaker of Kusunda, a language of unknown origins and unique sentence structures that has long baffled experts.

Libya's first video art exhibit proved a hit in Tripoli, drawing scores of spectators in a country emerging from 42 culturally barren years under the regime of slain dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

People from all over the capital flocked to the seaside Old City this month following the itinerary charted by "First Glance," an outdoor exhibition organized by The Arete Foundation for Arts and Culture, a Libyan initiative.

Five years ago, as he watched TV images of South Korea's foremost historical treasure being engulfed in flames lit by a lone arsonist, Hong Chang-Won remembers having to turn his head away.

"It was too heartbreaking to see such beautiful architecture being destroyed like that," said Hong, a registered master craftsman who specializes in traditional Korean ornamental painting.

Three armed robbers stormed into the Pretoria Art Museum Sunday and made away with around 15 million rands ($1.8 million) worth of artwork, South African media reported.

"They pulled out a list and said they were looking for so and so painting which is our old masterpieces," Daywood Khans, a museum employee who was held at gunpoint, told radio 702.