Top author David Grossman announced Thursday he will withdraw from contention for Israel's most prestigious arts and sciences award after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intervened to remove judges on political grounds.

The premier earlier this week had three of the Israel Prize judges removed, explaining on his Facebook page they were "extremist and anti-Zionist."

Harold Holzer, a longtime Abraham Lincoln scholar, has won a $50,000 prize for a book about the president and his relationship with the media.

Holzer's "Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion" has been chosen for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, announced Wednesday and administered by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Holzer has also written "Lincoln President-Elect," ''Lincoln at Cooper Union" and numerous other works.

Fans of Narendra Modi on Thursday scrapped plans to open a temple in his honor after the Indian premier said he was "appalled" by the idea.

Modi supporters had invested thousands of dollars in the temple in his home state of Gujarat, which houses a large statue of the charismatic leader -- a famously natty dresser -- and was due to open on Sunday.

A Tokyo district announced Thursday that it plans to issue "partnership" certificates to gay couples, becoming the first Japanese municipality to recognize same sex units -- albeit only symbolically.

The Shibuya district -- a crowded business hub that hosts many international firms and embassies, along with trendy fashion houses, cafes and schools -- said it planned to draft an ordinance designed to foster diversity and equality.

The Association for the Promotion and Exhibition of the Arts in Lebanon held a gala benefit dinner to celebrate its major drive in support of a new art museum for modern and contemporary art planned for 2020.

Over 400 collectors, art patrons and aficionados, leading officials and high profile business figures attended the glitzy event at the Habtour Hilton, which featured a lively auction of works by major Lebanese artists, a live modern ballet performance and a slew of inspiring speeches to kick off the first phase of APEAL’s campaign labeled “A Museum in the Making”.

A former electrician and his wife who kept 271 works of art by Picasso in their garage for close to 40 years went on trial in France on Tuesday accused of possessing stolen goods.

Pierre Le Guennec, now 75 and retired, says the world-famous artist and his wife Jacqueline gave him the oil canvases, drawings and Cubist collages when he was doing work on the last property they lived in before Picasso died in 1973.

Cierra Dorsey has happy memories of hanging out at the mall as a teenage girl, an adolescent rite of passage under threat in parts of the U.S. as old-fashioned malls close their doors.

While high-end malls thrive, many others have been unable to keep up with changing shopping demands of American consumers, leading to obituaries in the U.S. press with headlines such as "A dying breed: The American shopping mall," and "Shopping Malls In Crisis."

Australia's failure to end the entrenched disadvantage of Aboriginal people was described by Prime Minister Tony Abbott Wednesday as "profoundly disappointing" with key targets missed and employment levels actually worsening.

Abbott -- who has prioritised improving the lives of indigenous Australians -- said progress had been made in some health and education areas, but most goals were not being met and more work needed to be done for the country's most impoverished community.

A new study spotlights America's brutal legacy of racial violence, revealing that nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched in the south from 1877 to 1950, an average of more than one a week for 73 years.

The Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights group in Alabama that conducted the research, said present day racial discrimination and criminal justice problems are rooted in the country's violent past.

A centuries-old tomb in southern Egypt was partly demolished when a crane lifting blocks of sculpted masonry sliced through its dome, officials said on Tuesday.

Monday's accident happened when workmen were using the crane to move large blocks of stone to a site in the town of Aswan where an international exhibition for sculpture is being held.