It's been a banner year for New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The museum on Thursday announced its highest attendance in 40 years, saying over 5.6 million people visited during the fiscal year that ended June 30.

Attitudes toward Muslims have become slightly more positive in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany and Russia compared with five years ago, although negative views between Muslim countries and the West persist on both sides, a Pew Center survey found.

The survey, by Pew's Global Attitudes Project, found majorities of Muslims surveyed in five of six Muslim-dominant countries and the Palestinian territories described non-Muslim Westerners as selfish and greedy.

A man who claimed it was acceptable in his culture to have sex with a child was Friday sentenced to 10 years' jail for his lengthy abuse of a girl who became pregnant at 11.

The Victorian County Court heard that the man was from the same ethnic minority as the girl and had been a family friend when he began abusing her in 2008. She gave birth to a baby boy in October 2010.

With a fife and drum band playing Yankee Doodle and civil war re-enactors sweltering in the summer sun, a museum honoring the contribution of African Americans in the U.S. Civil War moved into its new home in Washington Monday.

"It is finally finished, a great new 5,000 square foot (465 square meters) African American Civil War Museum," Frank Smith, the director of the museum, said at a ceremony to install it in its new home overlooking a square housing a memorial to black Civil War soldiers.

An assistant museum curator who questioned the authenticity of a Leonardo da Vinci has been murdered — but before he died he left a code in his appointment calendar and a cryptic trail of clues connected to secrets in works of art that point to the killer.

Now, would-be gumshoes must figure out what drove one of four suspects to kill him. Was it greed? Fame? Lust? Or revenge?

Egypt's antiquities minister, whose trademark Indiana Jones hat made him one of the country's best known figures around the world, was fired Sunday after months of pressure from critics who attacked his credibility and accused him of having been too close to the regime of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

Zahi Hawass, long chided as publicity loving and short on scientific knowledge, lost his job along with about a dozen other ministers in a Cabinet reshuffle meant to ease pressure from protesters seeking to purge remnants of Mubarak's regime.

The Washington building known as the "temple of invention" when it was built in 1836 to hold the nation's patents is revisiting its roots, hosting a new "Great Hall of American Wonders" to explore 19th-century innovations through art.

The idea for this major exhibit that opened Friday at the Smithsonian American Art Museum was sparked in part by talk among experts that the United States is losing its edge in innovation as other countries spend more on research and export more technology and foreign companies gain more U.S. patents. Curators pulled together artworks, inventions and scientific discoveries from the 1800s in an unusual project for the museum to show how Americans came to believe they have a "special genius" for invention.

Thieves and art dealers are the usual suspects, but mildew and flashbulbs are just as dangerous for some of the Philippines' beleaguered cultural treasures.

From a 30,000-year-old skull fragment of one of its first human inhabitants to imposing churches built during Spanish colonial rule, the Southeast Asian archipelago has a stunning display of artifacts showcasing its diverse history.

Indians are consuming more meat than ever before despite a strong culture of vegetarianism and a religious taboo about consuming beef, as diets change and hygiene improves in the processing industry.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says Indians' per capita consumption of meat is running at 5.0 to 5.5 kilograms (11 to 12 pounds) a year, the highest since it began compiling records, reflecting a wider taste for protein-rich diets in developing countries.

American television audiences will see something unique this week — filmed live in the streets and palaces of an Italian city: Verdi's "Rigoletto" with Placido Domingo, singing right where the story is set.

When the plot says "midnight" — he's there exactly at midnight, singing from the city of Mantua for TV.