A large gold coin which had displaced an Australian coin as the world's biggest, but recently lost the title, was on display this week in Canada's largest city.

The coin, measuring 50 centimeters across, took over two years to make from design to final product. When it was introduced in 2007 by the Royal Canadian Mint, it set a Guinness World Record.

Cultural events will take over Scottish castles, ancient English monuments and every corner of London as part of a giant arts festival running in conjunction with the 2012 Olympics.

The lineup for the 12-week London 2012 Festival, announced by organizers Friday, ranges from pop-up William Shakespeare to vintage Alfred Hitchcock, and includes artists, musicians, writers and performers from Britain and around the world.

A cleaning woman at a German museum who mistook a sculpture for an unsightly mess has destroyed the valuable artwork beyond recognition, a spokeswoman for the western city of Dortmund said Thursday.

The cleaner at the city's Ostwall Museum went to work on the Martin Kippenberger installation entitled "When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling" which was valued by insurers at 800,000 Euros ($1.1 million), she said.

Police recovered two stolen paintings by Dutch masters and handed them back Thursday to the provincial museum they were stolen from five months ago. Three suspects are in custody, police said.

The 17th-century paintings, a depiction of two laughing boys by Frans Hals and a forest landscape by Jacob van Ruisdael, were snatched from the Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden museum in the central town of Leerdam in late May.

A newly proposed solution to an ancient enigma is reviving debate about the nature of a mysterious prehistoric site that some call the Holy Land's answer to Stonehenge.

Some scholars believe the structure of concentric stone circles known as Rujm al-Hiri was an astrological temple or observatory, others a burial complex. The new theory proposed by archaeologist Rami Arav of the University of Nebraska links the structure to an ancient method of disposing of the dead.

A landscape by painter Gustav Klimt that was stolen by the Nazis then returned this year to the family of the Jewish owner sold for a huge $40.4 million on Wednesday at Sotheby's in New York.

The painting, "Litzlberg am Attersee (Litzlberg on the Attersee)," easily topped its pre-sale high estimate of $25 million at the impressionist and modern sale.

UNESCO's Director General Irina Bokova called on the United States Wednesday to find a way to continue funding the U.N. cultural agency after Washington stopped its financing for admitting the Palestinians.

"I call on the U.S. administration, Congress and the American people to find a way forward and continue support for UNESCO in these turbulent times," Bokova said in a statement in which she detailed the agency's work.

A bronze sculpture of a young ballerina by French Impressionist Edgar Degas has failed to find a buyer at Christie's New York auction of impressionist and modern art.

"Little Dancer Aged Fourteen" had a pre-sale estimate of $25 million to $35 million. The auction was Tuesday night, but there were no bids.

A biology professor has won France's top literary prize for his first novel, which deals with France's colonial wars in Algeria and Southeast Asia.

Alexis Jenni, 48, received the prize Wednesday for "L'Art Francais de la Guerre" — "The French Art of War."

Thieves stole a rare 16th-century Portuguese book estimated to be worth 18,500 euros ($25,500) at the world's biggest book fair here last month, police said Wednesday.

Written in 1542 by Portuguese humanist philosopher Damiao de Gois, a friend and student of Erasmus, the 30-page book is entitled "Hispania damiani a goes equitis lusitani".