Pickled sharks, a diamond skull, polka dots and butterflies are all on display in a new exhibition devoted to bad-boy British artist Damien Hirst.

The Tate Modern show is Hirst's first major UK retrospective. It ranges from spot paintings and drug cabinets to works like "A Thousand Years" — a rotting cow's head abuzz with flies.

Booms from rocket launchers and automatic gunfire crackled around Mali's fabled town of Timbuktu, known as an ancient seat of Islamic learning, for its 700-year-old mud mosque and, more recently, as host of the musical Festival in the Desert that attracted Bono in January.

On Sunday, nomadic Tuaregs who descended from the people who first created Timbuktu in the 11th century and seized it from invaders in 1434, attacked the city in their fight to create a homeland for the Sahara's blue-turbanned nomads. Their assault deepens a political crisis sparked March 21 when mutinous soldiers seized power in the capital. The Tuaregs have rebelled before, but never have they succeeded in taking Timbuktu or the major northern centers of Kidal and Gao, which fell Friday and Saturday as demoralized government troops retreated.

Australia's greatest ancient Aboriginal rock art detailing kangaroos, turtles and humans on boulders in the remote Pilbara area will be studied under a U.S.$1.1 million deal announced Monday.

Tens of thousands of the indigenous works, which are scattered over the mineral-laden region, will be researched and catalogued under a six-year agreement between the University of Western Australia and miner Rio Tinto.

Legendary French fashion designer Pierre Cardin is in Beijing this weekend to present his 240-meter-high edifice "Light Palace" planned near Venice and which he hopes to reproduce in China.

The Palais Lumiere will be made up of three glass towers rising 780 feet high and linked by six giant discs visible from the outside and holding gardens, lakes and swimming pools.

The largest Titanic visitor attraction in the world opened in the ship's Belfast birthplace on Saturday, some 100 years after the doomed liner was built in the same yards.

Almost 100,000 tickets for Titanic Belfast, a striking aluminum-clad building which tells the famous ship's story through special effects, interactive screens and a ride, have been sold ahead of the opening.

Eight people have been arrested for allegedly killing two 10-year-old boys and a 55-year-old woman in ritual sacrifices by the cult of La Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, prosecutors in northern Mexico said Friday.

Jose Larrinaga, spokesman for Sonora state prosecutors, said the victims' blood was poured around an altar to the saint, which is depicted as a skeleton holding a scythe and clothed in flowing robes.

Wild applause broke out by the Leaning Tower of Pisa as cheering inhabitants in garish mediaeval costumes celebrated New Year's, welcoming in 2013 nine months before most of the rest of the world.

The once mighty Tuscan maritime republic has revived a tradition dating back centuries, when Pisa had its own calendar which began nine months before Christmas to mark Jesus Christ's miraculous conception instead of his birth.

A painting of a faceless man by Tim Storrier won Australia's most prestigious portraiture prize, the Archibald, along with a cheque for Aus$75,000 (US$78,000).

The work, entitled "The Histrionic Wayfarer (After Bosch)", features a pith-helmeted figure carrying a backpack with his dog Smudge perched on top. The figure has glasses but no face.

An intense and controversial restoration of the last great work by Leonardo da Vinci goes before the public Thursday at the Louvre Museum, revealing "The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" in the full panoply of hues and detail painted by the Renaissance master 500 years ago.

The 18-month-long restoration of the painting that Leonardo labored on for 20 years until his death in 1519 will go a long way to raising "Saint Anne" to its place as one of the most influential Florentine paintings of its time and a step towards the high Renaissance of Michelangelo.

Ernest Hemingway shows a tenderness that wasn't part of his usual macho persona in a dozen unpublished letters that became publicly available Wednesday in a collection of the author's papers at the Kennedy presidential library.

In a letter to his friend Gianfranco Ivancich written in Cuba and dated February 1953, Hemingway wrote of euthanizing his cat "Uncle Willie" after it was hit by a car.