Yoko Ono, the artist and widow of John Lennon, said on Thursday that India's booming art scene would be fertile ground for her experimental work as she prepared for her first show in the country.

Ono, who is renowned for her outlandish ideas, will display multi-media pieces at 20 venues across the capital New Delhi from Friday and also hold a live performance at the weekend.

The maker of Twinkies -- a tiny snack cake beloved by generations of Americans -- filed for bankruptcy protection Wednesday, but vowed to keep its baked goods flowing to hungry consumers.

Hostess Brands, which produces the iconic packaged cream-filled cake that has appeared in countless millions of lunch boxes since it was launched in 1930, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a New York court.

British artist and self-marketing genius Damien Hirst looks to connect the dots in a big way with the opening Thursday of a global show for his body of colored spot paintings.

The Gagosian Gallery network, with 11 locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva and Hong Kong, has been turned over entirely to Hirst's geometric blizzard of round spots.

Rights campaigners and politicians Wednesday condemned a video showing women from a protected and primitive tribe dancing for tourists in exchange for food on India's far-flung Andaman Islands.

British newspaper The Observer released the video showing Jarawa tribal women -- some of them naked -- being lured to dance and sing after a bribe was allegedly paid to a policeman to produce them.

Egyptian Islamists and other activists vowed Wednesday to prevent Israelis from making an annual pilgrimage to the tomb of a 19th-century Jewish holy man in the Nile Delta.

Pilgrimage opponents have decided to stage protests on roads leading to the tomb of Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira in the village of Daymouta, 180 kilometers (112 miles) north of Cairo, said Gamal Heshmat of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group which is the country's best organized political movement.

The Washington National Opera announced Tuesday it will present Richard Wagner's monumental four-part "Ring" cycle for the first time in its 56-year history in 2016.

The demanding Ring cycle -- 18.5 hours of music -- will be staged in its entirety three times, the company said in a statement.

Anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela's life story is to be turned into a six-part television mini-series co-created by his grandson, the producers behind the multinational project said Monday.

Entitled "Madiba", Mandela's clan name, the series "will take a broad view of the inner passions and outside forces that guided him," they said in a statement.

San Francisco is launching the 75th anniversary celebration of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge with a string of parties, guided tours and festivals to be held along the waterfront.

Authorities, however, won't be throwing open the orange span for a mass public walk.

It may not be everyone's idea of a dream home, but for bargain hunters in Hong Kong's turbocharged property market apartments that belonged to the recently deceased are proving irresistible -- and the more gruesome the occupant's demise the better.

Popular belief in a city awash with superstition runs that the ghost of a person who dies in unnatural circumstances -- a suicide, murder or bad accident -- inhabits their home, passing misfortune onto the new occupants.

New York City Opera shut its doors Monday after a contract dispute brought a company known for daring modern productions, as well as for nurturing greats such as Placido Domingo, to a halt.

"Rehearsals are canceled until we have a deal. We are taking this one day at a time," Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for New York City Opera, told Agence France Presse in an email. The opera was meant to be rehearsing Verdi's "La Traviata."