The boxing great was the guest of honor Thursday night at the 4th annual Norman Mailer Center benefit gala, which benefited the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, named for the late author. An old friend of Mailer, whose classic "The Fight" was an account of Ali's stunning defeat of then-heavyweight champion George Foreman in 1974, Ali was in attendance to watch the first ever presentation of the Muhammad Ali Ethics Award. The $10,000 writing prize for college students is co-sponsored by the Mailer center and the Muhammad Ali center.

In his prime, Ali would have been saved for last Thursday. But he has suffered for decades from Parkinson's disease and ceremony organizers decided to bring him on first in case he didn't have enough energy to last the night. The 70-year-old Ali was not simply introduced, but unveiled.

A Picasso painting the famous artist created in denouncing war has come to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis.

A Puerto Rican frog about the size of a peanut received federal protection Wednesday, ending a long battle to list it as an endangered species.

The habitat of the coqui llanero, which is the island's smallest tree frog, also received federal protection, covering 615 acres (249 hectares) of freshwater wetland in northern Puerto Rico.

Police in Canada have seized more than 600 barrels of maple syrup in New Brunswick as part of an investigation into the theft of millions worth of syrup in Quebec and are transporting it back to Quebec under police protection, officials said.

The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers reported large quantities of syrup missing last month during a routine inventory, finding empty barrels at a site of the province's global strategic reserve at St-Louis-de-Blandford.

Oil prices rose slightly Thursday after positive U.S. economic reports offset some of the pessimism about global growth prospects.

Benchmark oil for November delivery was up 16 cents to $88.30 per barrel at midday Bangkok time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. On Wednesday, oil fell $3.75, or 4.1 percent, to $88.14 per barrel in New York. That was the biggest decline since May 4.

Police say they arrested a U.S. man after he showed up at a crime scene wearing a Batman outfit because he wouldn't leave them alone.

"He wouldn't clear the scene, and we had a canine out there, and he kept screwing up the scent," State Police Sgt. Jeff Gorno told the Petoskey News-Review. "He said he wanted to help us look for the driver."

Lacking the necessary cash and manpower, Pakistan is struggling to stem the flow of millions of dollars in ancient Buddhist artifacts that looters dig up in the country's northwest and smuggle to collectors around the world.

The black market trade in smuggled antiquities is a global problem that some experts estimate is worth billions of dollars per year. The main targets are poor countries like Pakistan that possess a rich cultural heritage but don't have the resources to protect it.

Marc Jacobs, more than anyone, knows that it's not what you say but how you say it. The Louis Vuitton showman thus capped an incredibly strong Paris fashion week — with help from artist Daniel Buren — by building a life-size shopping mall inside the Louvre.

Understatement is not a word in Jacobs' vocabulary, so a collaboration with the minimalist artist — who made the famed striped columns in Paris' Palais Royal — might have raised eyebrows. But Buren rose to the occasion.

Orthodox Jewish Israelis, the driving force of the West Bank settlement movement, have begun to turn their attention inward to Israel itself, moving into Arab areas of mixed cities in an attempt to cement the Jewish presence there.

Activists say that in recent years, several thousand devout Jews have pushed into rundown Arab areas of Jaffa, Lod, Ramle and Acre, hardscrabble cities divided between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods. Their arrival has threatened to disrupt fragile ethnic relations with construction of religious seminaries and housing developments marketed exclusively to Jews.

A federal inspector found two strains of salmonella and unclean conditions at an Indiana cantaloupe farm's fruit-packing plant during inspections prompted by a deadly outbreak linked to the farm's melons.

The Food and Drug Administration's report on the mid-August inspections at Chamberlain Farm Produce Inc. shows an inspector found improperly cleaned and apparently rusted and corroded equipment. The inspector also found what appeared to be algae growing in standing water beneath conveyer belts at the Owensville, Ind., plant, the report said.