Some 164 Protestant clergymen in the Daejeon and Sejong City area on Thursday held a protest urging President Park Geun-hye to resign over her sloppy measures against the state intelligence agency’s alleged interference in the 2012 presidential election. Calling it a “serious incident that threatens the basis of democracy,” the religious leaders said Park should assume responsibility, apologize ...

PARIS (AP) ― A U.S. charitable foundation said Wednesday that it was the anonymous bidder that paid $530,000 for 24 Native American masks in a contested Paris auction two days ago, and will return them to the Hopi and the San Carlos Apache tribes. “These are not trophies to have on one’s mantel,” said Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, director of the Los Angeles-based Annenberg Foundation, which rev...

SYDNEY (AFP) ― The Sydney Opera House has come up with a novel new way to raise funds and boost the building’s profile by selling “virtual” ownership of the tiles on its tallest sail. On Monday, 125,000 of the tiles went on sale, with Hollywood star Hugh Jackman among the first to put his money behind the initiative which hopes to raise 15 million Australian dollars ($13.7 million). Under the s...

CAIRO (AFP) ― Egypt said Sunday it has recovered a statue of Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s sister looted from the southern Mallawi museum during riots by supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi. The 32 centimeter limestone statue of Ankhesamon, sister of the famous boy king and daughter of pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled around B.C. 1,500, was stolen on Aug. 14. “The piece is one of the most importan...

DETROIT (AP) ― A former Detroit university professor is pledging $5 million, hoping it will spark a wildfire of private financial support to protect valuable art from being sold to pay creditors in the city’s bankruptcy. A. Paul Schaap said he wants to help the Detroit Institute of Arts as well as retirees whose pensions could be cut as part of the city’s plan to eventually exit bankruptcy. Art ...

PARIS (AFP) ― A Paris court on Friday dismissed an attempt by advocacy group Survival International to block the auction of 25 sacred objects from Arizona’s Hopi tribe that has caused outrage. The sale of the “Kachina” ceremonial masks and headdresses will go ahead on Monday as planned, despite pleas from the Hopi’s religious authorities to cancel the auction. The court battle against auction h...

LONDON (AP) ― An out-of-this-world sex scene invoking stars, supernovas and statisticians has won U.S.-based writer Manil Suri the uncoveted Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Suri, a novelist and mathematician, won the annual British prize for a passage in his novel “The City of Devi,” in which the characters “streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atom...

The era of 35 mm film in South Korea‘s movie industry has been phased out in favor of digital projectors at major theaters across the nation. Cinecube, the only movie theater which supported analogue film screening, recently replaced its projectors with a digital model. As the arthouse theater opted for a digital system, Korean moviegoers have nowhere to watch latest films on the traditional ree...