Paper replicas of Apple's iPad and iPhone are selling like hot cakes in China this year as millions prepare to honor their ancestors in an age-old annual festival that has taken on a modern twist.

Tomb Sweeping Day, which falls on April 4 this year, sees families remember their ancestors by laying out food at their grave sites and burning paper replicas of daily necessities such as clothes, money, cars and houses.

For the first time since his death in February, a painting by Spanish artist Antoni Tapies was sold Wednesday at an auction that also featured works by Fernando Botero and Pablo Picasso.

The 1956 grey and black abstract painting sold for 223,630 Euros ($298,443). It had an asking price of 190,000 Euros.

In a synagogue in northeast India, a group of men pray for the chance to "return home" to a country they have never seen and which their ancestors fled nearly 3,000 years ago.

"India is not our country," says Haniel Reuben, 72, one of the eldest members of a tiny community that claims to have descended from the Manasseh -- one of the biblical "lost tribes" of Israel exiled in 720 BC by Assyrian conquerors.

New York's gritty subway has got its sense of poetry back with the return of a popular program to bring verses to commuters.

The Metropolitan Transport Authority, which runs the underground system, announced it was restoring its Poetry in Motion initiative after a hiatus of four years.

Vesselina Kasarova's repertoire ranges from Donizetti to Wagner. Critics rave over her voice and her character depictions are the gold standard for young singers aspiring to opera stardom.

Asked recently if she would again become a singer from her present perspective at the top, she shrugged.

Hilton Kramer, the former chief art critic at The New York Times and founding editor of The New Criterion magazine, has died. He was 84.

Kramer's wife Esta said he had been suffering from a blood disease, and died early Tuesday. He had been in an assisted living facility in Harpswell, Maine.

A virtual adventure at sea with storms and battles, a new "jewel box" for Asian art and a high-tech building shaped like a bathtub: Amsterdam's landmark museums are getting facelifts to catapult them from their dusty pasts into the 21st century.

The makeover of three of the capital's most important museums, the Maritime Museum, the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum, has been hailed as the dawn of a "new cultural golden age" to attract the 12.2 million visitors to Amsterdam every year.

A rare watercolor study by Paul Cezanne believed lost and last seen in 1953 will be auctioned in New York City where it's expected to fetch up to $20 million.

It's being offered May 1 at Christie's.

Among the items U.S. soldiers seized from Adolf Hitler's Bavarian Alps hideaway in the closing days of World War II were albums meticulously documenting an often forgotten Nazi crime — the massive pillaging of artwork and other cultural items as German troops marched through Europe.

Two of those albums — one filled with photographs of works of art, the other with snapshots of furniture — were donated Tuesday to the U.S. National Archives, which now has custody of 43 albums in a set of what historians believe could be as high as 100.

In an attempt to award performers who, during their lifetimes, have made creative contributions of outstanding artistic significance to the field of recording "Desert Masterpiece Production” owned by Egyptian media mogul Mr. Ayman Sabek with the partnership of Lions Hermes Beirut District will be hosting on Saturday 31st March 2012, at 6:30PM, a ceremony honoring the renowned Egyptian actor Mr. Mahmoud Hemida at UNESCO Palace.

The Lebanese tenor Gabriel Abdel Nour will mark the opening of this ceremony, singing the Lebanese and Egyptian national anthems.