A museum of African design opened in a renovated Johannesburg warehouse Thursday, promising to showcase work by the continent's finest contemporary artists.

Around 200 works by 100 artists fill the space in the city's old industrial area Maboneng. Most are from southern Africa, but director Aaron Kohn said the museum had continental ambitions.

Two pre-Columbian mummies more than a thousand years old were found in a pre-Incan cemetery in a suburb of Lima, archeologists said Thursday.

"This is one of the most important finds in more than three decades of excavation, because both mummies are intact," Gladys Paz told Agence France Presse at the foot of the Huaca Pucllana tomb, an ancient religious complex in the Miraflores neighborhood.

Flags flew at half-mast and crowds of mourners turned out to pay their respects Friday after Thailand's top Buddhist leader died aged 100.

Supreme Patriarch Somdet Phra Nyanasamvara died on Thursday due to a blood infection following recent surgery for an intestinal infection, according to Chulalongkorn hospital where he had been receiving treatment.

The sister of the Emir of Qatar was named the most influential figure in the art world in a "power list" published by Britain's ArtReview magazine on Thursday.

Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bint al-Thani has around $1 billion a year to spend on art as head of the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), according to ArtReview -- 30 times more than New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Saudi Arabia on Thursday warned it will take measures against activists who go ahead with a planned weekend campaign to defy a ban on women drivers in the conservative Muslim kingdom.

"It is known that women in Saudi are banned from driving and laws will be applied against violators and those who demonstrate in support" of this cause, Interior Ministry spokesman General Mansur al-Turki told AFP.

A decades-long dispute between members of one of India's former royal families over palaces, diamonds and other items worth billions of dollars has been settled, a family member said.

Members of the Gaekwad family Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding before a judge in the western city of Vadodara over property that includes a palace reportedly four times the size of Britain's Buckingham Palace.

A Facebook petition supporting a Dutch Christmas character called "Black Pete" on Wednesday hit a million 'likes', revealing the liberal nation's attachment to a beloved figure the U.N. has warned may be racist.

Anger over the issue has swept the Netherlands after a U.N. human rights body said it was assessing whether "Zwarte Piet", who accompanies Saint Nicholas during a traditional children's festival before Christmas, is racist.

Saudi female activists are gearing up to test a long-standing driving ban, with more defiant women already getting behind the wheel as the authorities seem to be taking a more lenient approach.

Under the slogan "women's driving is a choice," they have called on social networks for a turn-out on Saturday in a campaign in the world's only country that bans women from driving.

A descendant of Florence's famous Medici family told Agence France Presse on Tuesday that mass tourism was a "threat" to his native city and called for it to be put on a Unesco list of endangered areas.

"There is serious urban degradation, an overuse of the city, an insufficient attention to the artistic heritage of the city," the angry prince, Ottaviano de Medici, said in a statement.

Yoga is moving from the studio mat to a U.S. museum gallery.

The Smithsonian Institution has organized what curators believe is the first exhibition about the visual history and art of yoga, its origins and evolution over time.