PLYMOUTH, Mass. — In this place sometimes known as America's hometown, schoolchildren and tourists flock to see Plymouth Rock, a replica of the Mayflower and the place where the Pilgrims and Mashpee Wampanoags Indians shared the first Thanksgiving meal.

But the staid and historic image of Plymouth could soon be tempered by a decidedly modern attraction: a $488 million film and television studio, complete with 14 sound stages, a 10-acre back lot, a theater, a 300-room upscale hotel, a spa and 500,000 square feet of office space.

The thought of turning Plymouth into a movie Mecca has won the enthusiastic support of many residents, but some don't like the idea of adding Hollywood to their history.

"We don't need you; we've already got Plymouth Rock," says Laurien Enos, one of just three of 116 Town Meeting members who voted last month against allowing the developers to build the studio on a golf course here, about 40 miles south of Boston....

Ethiopia is demanding that Britain's museums return some of its most significant religious treasures. President Girma Wolde-Giorgis has personally intervened in a dispute to get the artefacts, including the Ethiopian royal crown, returned home 140 years after they were "looted" by marauding British troops.


The President has written to the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Library and Cambridge University Library seeking the restitution of more than 400 so-called "treasures of Magdala", which were stolen by British soldiers following a battle in 1868.

In the letter, obtained by The Independent on Sunday, the President wrote: "I must state that Ethiopians have long grieved at the loss of this part of their national heritage. Ethiopians feel that this act of appropriation had no justification in international law. I feel, therefore, that the time has come for the return of Ethiopia's looted treasures....

Like a combination of Mario Testino and Alastair Campbell, he was the chief projector of royal glamour, and chief political image maker, of Charles I.

In the process Anthony van Dyck set the standard for the grand British regal portrait, and was emulated by later artists from Gainsborough to John Singer Sargent to the portraitists of the golden age of Hollywood.

In February, Tate Britain promises to present the "sensation of the spring" when it brings together 60 of Van Dyck's most seductive and sumptuous works, mostly from the 1630s, alongside another 70 pieces by other artists that bring his development, and his legacy, into context.

The works on display will include 10 rarely seen great Van Dycks from the Royal Collection, chief among them the magnificent equestrian portrait of Charles I that normally hangs in Buckingham Palace.

Other highlights will include the sensitive double portrait of Van Dyck with his friend, the...

The 45 year old woman had been given the art work for her ninth birthday but had kept it in her loft for years and forgot about it until she put her house up for sale.

An eagle-eyed auctioneer who was valuing her belongings spotted the oil painting and was stunned when he realised it was by 19th century artist John Everett Millais.

As well as being worth thousands, the dusty painting has also shed light on a 150-year-old scandal of a love triangle involving Pre-Raphaelite artist Millais.

The portrait is of a woman called Effie Gray who was married to Millais' mentor and art critic John Ruskin at the time.

Millais, whose work includes the famous Ophelia painting, met and fell in love with Gray in 1853 while he used her for another painting, the Order of Release.

Gray was in a loveless marriage with Ruskin and left him to marry Millais three years later. They went on to have eight children together.

The portrait of...

One of the most enduring symbols of the old Yugoslavia will bow out this week when the Zastava car plant shuts down its assembly line.

The maker of the Yugo car will stop production on Friday after sending the equally loved and hated symbol of Yugoslav socialism to the graveyard earlier this month alongside its East German cousin the Trabant.

Tomislav Novicic spent nearly 40 years at the Serbian car producer assembling the Yugo, Zastava 101 and other models. Now he is preparing to retire after the assembly line shuts down.

"I am sorry to see that Serbia is not going to have a local made car anymore," Novicic said. "We were so proud to be able to produce the Yugo. We managed to conquer international markets with it."

Soon, the buildings of the Zastava company in the central town of Kragujevac will be renovated to house a new company that Serbia has established with Italy's Fiat.

When the National Museum of American History reopens on Friday after two years and $85 million of renovation, it may begin to shed its reputation as one of the more cramped and confounding corners of the Smithsonian Institution. The nickname “America’s Attic” may still come in handy now and then for describing the Smithsonian’s network of museums, with their squirreled-away treasures, but at the history museum a central five-story atrium now streams with daylight, promising other forms of illumination as the visitor heads off to the new or refreshed displays, with others to open in the next few months.

This doesn’t mean that the museum has solved its considerable problems — some loom larger now, simply because expectations are higher and more renovations are to follow in coming years. But the sense of change is dramatic. When you enter the atrium from the National Mall, you face a 40-foot-by-19-foot “waving flag” made of 960 reflective panels whose colors subtly shift as...

Russia has returned six medieval stained glass window panes looted by the Soviet Red Army in 1945 to a church in Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border.

The 700-year-old windows were thought vanished or destroyed until 2005, when they were discovered by a Russian art historian at a cloister outside Moscow, under the jurisdiction of the Pushkin Museum.

The first 111 panels, which had been in the possession of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, were returned by Russia in 2002.

More than 40 years after Christians were infuriated by the Beatles' claim that they were "more popular than Jesus", the Roman Catholic Church has made peace with the Fab Four.

Saturday's edition of the Vatican's official newspaper absolves John Lennon of his notorious remark, saying that "after so many years it sounds merely like the boasting of an English working-class lad struggling to cope with unexpected success".

In a lengthy editorial marking the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' famous White Album, L'Osservatore Romano heaps lavish praise on the British band.

"The talent of Lennon and the other Beatles gave us some of the best pages in modern pop music," said the newspaper, which has recently tried to shake off its stuffy image by covering popular culture events such as the Oscars and inviting articles from Muslim and Jewish contributors.

For those who believe the ancient Greeks thought of everything first, proof has been found in a 4th century AD joke book featuring an ancestor of Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch where a man returns a parrot to a shop, complaining it is dead.

The 1,600-year-old work entitled "Philogelos: The Laugh Addict," one of the world's oldest joke books, features a joke in which a man complains that a slave he has just bought has died, its publisher said on Friday.

"By the gods," answers the slave's seller, "when he was with me, he never did any such thing!"

In a comedy act Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, first aired in 1969 and regularly voted one of the funniest ever, the pet-shop owner says the parrot, a "Norwegian Blue," is not dead, just "resting" or "pining for the fjords."