The earliest movies known to be shot in color have been revived by film archivists, who on Wednesday gave an audience at London's Science Museum a glimpse at cinema's first attempts to show us the world as we see it.
The obscure film segments were long considered failed prototypes, blurry flickers of color seen by no more than a handful of people before being consigned to an archive. But the National Media Museum in the northern England city of Bradford said digitization had effectively rescued the footage, unlocking remarkably modern-looking images created more than a century ago.

A museum scarcely bigger than a Paris flat sheds light on a momentous era for physics, a time of heroic individuals who made extraordinary discoveries but often at hideous risk.
Within the walls of the former "Radium Institute" in the city's Latin Quarter is the preserved laboratory of Marie Curie, central figure of the greatest dynasty in modern science.

British archaeologists announced on Wednesday that a skeleton found under a city centre car park in central England could be that of the medieval king Richard III.
Researchers from the University of Leicester said they had found a male skeleton with similarities to historical descriptions of Richard, who ruled England between 1483 and his death in battle in 1485.

The Afghan government has recommended legal action against two TV channels for allegedly broadcasting scantily dressed women and disseminating immorality, officials said Wednesday.
A ministry of information and culture official said stations Saba, which means dawn, and Setara, which means star -- were guilty of broadcasting songs, in which "there was lots of nudity".

Growing tensions and fears of separatism prompted communist Bulgaria to orchestrate an ethnic purge against its Turkish minority in 1989, newly published archive documents showed this week.
On May 29, 1989, Bulgaria opened its Iron Curtain border with Turkey -- sealed until then -- and urged Ankara to follow suit and accept part of its 750,000-strong Turkish minority.

The Telecommunications Ministry announced on Wednesday the production of a stamp in honor of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Lebanon.
The endeavor, launched in cooperation with LibanPost, will kick off on Saturday.

A group of 170 Hindus from Pakistan who travelled to India on pilgrim visas have said they will not return home due to alleged persecution in the Islamic republic.
Officials in the western Indian state of Rajasthan have reported an increase in Hindu refugees, but Pakistani authorities say the numbers are exaggerated and those who leave are economic migrants seeking better jobs.

Andy Warhol wasn't just prolific himself, but inspired the whole field of contemporary art, and now an exhibit opening at New York's Met traces that influence across half a century.
"Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years" opens Wednesday until the end of the year and is being presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the first to examine the king of Pop Art's wide-ranging legacy.

A box of bric-a-brac purchased for several dollars at a Virginia flea market contained an unlikely treasure: a painting by French Impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
The canvas, which shows a scene along the Seine River titled "Paysage Bords de Seine," is scheduled to be auctioned later this month by the Potomack Company, an auction house in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC.

Swaziland is poor in resources, so King Mswati III is courting investors with his kingdom's vast cultural traditions as he tries to lift the nation out of an economic crisis.
Every year the nation's international trade fair coincides with the famous reed dance, a massive showcase of local culture in which tens of thousands of young women swarm across the kingdom to dance bare-breasted in beaded mini-skirts and colorful pompoms for the king at his royal palace.
