Stage left is Josefina, a rough-talking working girl; stage right, Sofia, a swankily dressed bourgeois who has fallen on hard times.

The two characters in Venezuelan playwright Virginia Urdaneta's new play come together doing something that real people in her homeland spend long hours doing, across the country, every day: waiting in line to buy scarce products from barren supermarket shelves.

Italian police have seized a 15-million-euro ($16-million) Picasso and a precious Roman statue they suspect were about to be smuggled out of the country, media reports said Friday.

The Picasso was described as being a 1912 work from the Spanish artist's Cubist period.

Eva Gabrielsson doesn't mince her words: continuing the wildly successful Millennium trilogy written by her late partner Stieg Larsson is a mistake and should never have happened.

The highly-anticipated fourth instalment, written by David Lagercrantz, a journalist and author best known as footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic's official biographer, is due out on August 27 in 35 countries.

The cover for Harper Lee's new novel will surely remind you of the cover for her old one.

On Wednesday, HarperCollins unveiled the jacket art for Lee's "Go Set a Watchman," the unexpected follow-up to her classic "To Kill a Mockingbird."

England's slain king Richard III, exhumed from an undignified grave beneath a car park, will finally be buried with honor on Thursday in an unprecedented ceremony filled with pageantry and poignancy.

Some 530 years on from his brutal demise, the last English monarch killed in battle will be laid to rest in Leicester Cathedral, across the street from where his remains were located in 2012 in a feat of archaeology.

Cambodia unveiled a new memorial at a notorious Khmer Rouge prison Thursday to remember the thousands who were tortured and murdered there during the ruthless regime's rule in late 1970s.

The $90,000 tribute, reminiscent of a Buddhist stupa and paid for by the German government, was unveiled in front of survivors of the Tuol Sleng prison in the capital Phnom Penh.

Workers at Syria's National Museum of Damascus carefully wrap statues and place them in boxes to be transported to a safe place, hoping to save the priceless pieces from theft or destruction.

Since his 2012 appointment as head of antiquities in the midst of Syria's civil war, Maamoun Abdulkarim says just one thing has been on his mind -- avoiding a repeat of the kind of looting that ravaged Iraq's heritage after the 2003 invasion.

King Richard III's closest known relatives set foot Wednesday on Bosworth Battlefield where the 15th-century monarch was slain, feeling the historic moment come to life on the eve of his reburial.

In the spring sunshine, four relatives of the last Plantagenet king stood in the quiet rolling Leicestershire fields, imagining the brutal clash that changed the course of English history.

A major exhibition on the human body in ancient Greek art is to open at the British Museum from Thursday, exploring notions of ideal beauty as rendered in marble, terracotta and bronze.

"Defining beauty: the body in ancient Greek art" will trace representations of the body in ancient Greece from simple figurines to the height of realism achieved under Alexander the Great.

A Chinese restaurant in the Kenyan capital Nairobi has been shut down and its owners summoned by authorities after it emerged it was barring black patrons, reports said Wednesday.

The restaurant became the focus of city authorities after furious residents took to social media to denounce an apparently racist policy of not allowing African patrons to eat there after 5pm -- pushing #RacistRestaurant, #NoBlacksHere and #TheChineseInvasion to be top trending topics.