One of Japan's best-known contemporary artists is locked in a fight with a public museum over claims it has threatened to pull the plug on works critical of the conservative government.

Makoto Aida said the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo told him to yank the pieces from an exhibit that started last week because they were "not suitable" for kids, but the museum countered that it just asked him to "modify" his creations.

A group of archaeologists have found an adult human tooth dating back around 560,000 years in southwestern France, in what researchers hailed as a "major discovery" Tuesday. 

"A large adult tooth -- we can't say if it was from a male or female -- was found during excavations of soil we know to be between 550,000 and 580,000 years old, because we used different dating methods," paleoanthropologist Amelie Viallet told Agence France Presse.

Hitler sporting a Karl Marx beard and a swastika formed with axes are just some of the provocative pieces starring at the first show ever by Slovenia's shock art collective, NSK.

The show launches as the now cult Slovenian art project again ruffles establishment feathers by staging a pair of unlikely summer concerts in pariah nation North Korea.

Pope Francis opened the registration period for next year's World Youth Day in Poland, using a tablet computer to sign himself up from a window overlooking St. Peter's Square during the traditional Sunday blessing.

The pontiff was joined by two young people as he extended an invitation to the world's Roman Catholic youth to join him in Krakow from July 25-31, 2016.

Several hundred people have attended a Mass at a Detroit Catholic church to protest an 8½-foot (2.6-meter)-tall bronze statue of Satan that hundreds of people also lined up to see.

The Satanic Temple had said it would unveil the statue Saturday at a Detroit location that only people with tickets would know. Hundreds lined up Saturday evening to get the tickets as Christian protesters rallied nearby.

The Bayreuth Festival, one of the hottest tickets in the world of opera, opened with a well-received new production of Richard Wagner's opera "Tristan and Isolde" on Saturday, which also won praise from German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The dark and pessimistic new reading of one of Wagner's best-loved works by the composer's 37-year-old great-granddaughter, Katharina Wagner, was greeted with cheers and generous applause at the end of the six-hour performance.

A court in northeast China has sentenced five people to prison for spreading the teachings of a banned religious group that's been linked to a killing of a woman in a McDonald's restaurant last year.

The Intermediate Court in the city of Panjin said Saturday the five were sentenced of two to three years for undermining the implementation of the law, recruiting believers and propagating the group called Quannengshen.

Catholics in this Paraguayan town paid homage to St. Francis Solano on Friday in a peculiar religious festival that involves dressing up in bird-feather suits.

The celebration was held at the chapel that bears the name of the saint, who was born in Spain in 1549 and died in Peru 1610. Solano was canonized in 1726.

On the mean and traffic-choked streets of Mexico City, a fearless superhero is fighting to protect the planet from the worst the internal combustion engine can throw at it.

The mighty Peatonito (Little Pedestrian) pushes cars blocking the path of pedestrians, creates crosswalks with spray paint, and climbs on vehicles parked on sidewalks -- though his mother has begged him to stop stepping on them.

Around the corner from a bland gray street in the working class Tres de Febrero suburb of Buenos Aires, a blue boat starts to take form on a wall.

Street artist Andres Rotundo Fraga, wearing a green overall and armed with a brush and some acrylic paint, has started a three-day project aimed at reviving an apartment wall damaged by indecipherable graffiti.