Some 250 works of contemporary art are being donated to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the U.S. museum announced Friday.

The gift is from American collector and former art dealer Virginia Dwan, 81, and includes 34 sculptures, 15 paintings, as well as prints and drawings, photographs, films and a set of artist books.

Poland's powerful Roman Catholic church on Friday apologized over two alleged pedophile priests as prosecutors on both sides of the Atlantic began probing the men, one a former Vatican envoy.

Prosecutors in the Dominican Republic have asked Interpol to arrest fugitive Polish priest Wojciech Gil, 36, who allegedly abused several young boys while serving on the Caribbean island.

A nine-metre (30-foot) high bronze statue of South Africa's first black president Nelson Mandela will be erected at a government complex in the capital Pretoria, an official said Thursday.

The figure with outstretched arms and one foot slightly forward, will depict a younger looking Mandela, as he looked 10 years after his 1994 election.

The world's longest-running cartoon is to go fully digital, its Japanese broadcaster said Friday, abandoning hand-drawn celluloid-based animation after a run of 44 years.

Fuji Television Network said episodes of "Sazae-san" aired from October would be produced entirely digitally. The move will mean there are no hand-drawn cartoons left on Japanese television, according to the Association of Japanese Animations.

Kim Bok-dong was only 14 when Japanese occupying forces knocked on her parents' door and requisitioned her for what they said was wartime work in a factory.

Instead, she found herself on the battlefield in a brothel where soldiers had sex with her from morning until evening, every day for years -- one of tens of thousands of girls used as "comfort women" by the Japanese military during the Second World War.

Besides killing more than 100,000 people, Syria's civil war is exacting another irreparable toll as historic sites and artworks are looted or destroyed in the fighting.

An emergency list of endangered artworks was released Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The initiative stems from the International Council of Museums, in collaboration with UNESCO and the U.S. State Department.

Christie's on Thursday kicked off its first independent auction in mainland China, marking its full-fledged entry into a market considered a key growth engine for global art sales.

Hundreds of people showed up as 42 items -- from Asian contemporary art and Western masterworks to jewelry, watches and wine -- went under the hammer with estimates for their combined totaling 100 million yuan ($16.3 million).

A flawless 59.60-carat pink diamond known as the "Pink Star" is up for grabs at a Sotheby's auction in November with an asking price of $60 million (49 million euros), the highest ever sought at auction for a gemstone.

David Bennett, chairman of Sotheby's jewelery division in Europe and the Middle East, said the diamond belonged in "the ranks of the Earth's greatest natural treasures".

Jesus Christ was the world's first tweeter because his pronouncements were "brief and full of meaning", Vatican cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi said Wednesday.

Christ "used tweets before everyone else, with elementary phrases made up of fewer than 45 characters like 'Love one another'", said Ravasi, the Vatican's equivalent of a culture minister.

The Miss World final takes place on the Indonesian resort island of Bali on Saturday after weeks of protests from Muslim hardliners and warnings that extremists could attack the pageant.

Police and traditional Balinese security personnel, wearing sarongs and armed with daggers, will be out in force on the Hindu-majority island as the beauty queens take to the stage.