Visitors to the four-room museum in the Chilean capital, Santiago, will be able to see the general’s uniform, sabres, books and knives – even his collection of toy soldiers.

Guided visits for groups of 12 will start on Monday and more than 150 people have already registered to visit.

Gen Pinochet’s widow, Lucia Hiriart, said the inauguration showed that “little by little justice is being done” for her husband.

Gen Pinochet led a military junta that overthrew elected Marxist President Salvador Allende in 1973 and launched a brutal campaign to root out Leftists.

An official report said that 3,197 suspected Leftists were killed for political reasons before he left power in 1990. Many seemingly vanished – believed to have been kidnapped, tortured and killed – leaving relatives no word on their fate.

Attempts in Chile and abroad to prosecute Gen Pinochet for human rights abuses continued until his death two years ago, at 91...

AN INTERNATIONAL Jewish human rights organisation has called for a new investigation into whether parts of the Hunt Museum collection in Limerick may have been looted by the Nazis.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which has headquarters in Los Angeles, first raised questions about the provenance of some of the museum's collection in a letter to President Mary McAleese in 2004.

An expert group subsequently set up by the Royal Irish Academy to examine the issue reported that most of the items under suspicion were unlikely to have a "problematic past". A second report by Lynn Nicholas, a world authority on Nazi looted art, concluded there was no proof that the late John and Gertrude Hunt were Nazis, or that they were involved in any kind of espionage or trafficking in looted art.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre was subsequently criticised by President McAleese for making unproven allegations about the museum, a criticism the centre rejected. A new...

The Old State Capitol in Springfield has a Barack Obama speech and the pen he used to sign it. The DuSable Museum of African American History will be getting paintings that adorned his Senate office.

And the Chicago History Museum has questions.

The curators and archivists at Illinois museums have been excited to find themselves in the middle of history in the making, and they have searched out ways to document the moment for future generations.

On a nondescript block south of New York's Union Square, up a dreary staircase and through a black-barred gate, there is a long, narrow room that might be mistaken for a very small museum of literary counterculture. On one wall hangs two rows of iconic posters: Paul Davis's print of Che Guevara's proud head; a photograph of the authors Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg marching at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; a portrait of Bobby Kennedy. Loose-leaf binders of correspondence with groundbreaking authors line floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Beside the bookcases, Samuel Beckett peers out of a black-and-white photograph with a fierce crow's gaze. Next to him in the picture stands a shorter, milder-looking man named Barney Rosset.

Rosset's publishing house, Grove Press, was a tiny company operating out of the ground floor of Rosset's brownstone when it published an obscure play called "Waiting for Godot" in 1954. By the time Beckett had won...

FRANKFURT — Here at the Städel Museum “The Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden” is an old-fashioned whodunit. Almost exhaustingly erudite, it mixes up very great Netherlandish paintings of the 15th century with a few not so great ones to unravel perennial questions from galaxy academe about which artist painted what.

Why should we care? For the same reason film buffs debate if Howard Hawks was the real director behind “The Thing From Another World,” the sci-fi classic from 1951 he produced, rather than Christian Nyby, the credited director, or whether the 1943 thriller “Journey Into Fear,” for which Norman Foster is listed as director, was taken over by Orson Welles, who played a Turkish police detective in it and whose other movies it partly resembles.

We should care because, commerce and the usual scholarly nitpicking aside, the debate is itself an excuse for looking closer, and because piecing together any great artist’s legacy is a bit like...

On the eve of a planned Sotheby’s auction of three documents related to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Harry Belafonte, the singer and a friend of Dr. King who owned the papers, withdrew the items for sale.

In a brief statement released on Wednesday afternoon, Sotheby’s said the items had been removed from the auction roster “at the request of Mr. Harry Belafonte.” Sotheby’s gave no reason for the withdrawal, and Mr. Belafonte did not return calls left with his agent.

The items scheduled for the auction on Thursday included a three-page handwritten outline of one of Dr. King’s most important speeches, “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam,” delivered in February 1967, and notes for a speech recovered from his suit pocket after he was assassinated in 1968. The third document was a typewritten condolence letter to Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s widow, from President Lyndon B. Johnson.

After news reports early this week about the auction the King...

If Gordon Brown, the UK's current prime minister, or the next American president (yet to be determined) were to visit the British Museum's latest high-profile show, Hadrian: Empire and Conflict , he might find some uncomfortable parallels with one of Rome's greatest emperors — not to mention some differences he might envy.

As the exhibition catalogue points out, the major conflict zones of his time are strikingly familiar today: the Balkans, Caucasus, Mesopotamia and Judea/Palestine, where he faced (tables turned) Jewish rebellions from AD 116.

Forced to rein back after the imperial over-stretch of his predecessor Trajan , Hadrian initially fought Middle Eastern rebellions, but then turned, despite the risks and doubters, to troop withdrawals, beginning in what is modern-day Iraq.

To celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama, the Smithsonian Institution yesterday announced 10 exhibits at its museums -- five that are brand new and five that center on Abraham Lincoln.

Those five shows play into the Lincoln-Obama connections that popped up during the election, and also give the Smithsonian a little jump on the events surrounding next year's bicentennial of Lincoln's birth.

"Part of it is that Lincoln is an enduring personality. Lincoln is in our national DNA, and because of that you can always go back to Lincoln," said Harry R. Rubenstein, the chairman of the division of politics and reform at the National Museum of American History, explaining the exhibit choice."He is always relevant, especially at this point where we are marking historic changes."

Curators at five museums have organized the presidential-themed exhibits tied to the inauguration on Jan. 20.

"Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life," a new show pulled from the collections at the...

Described as "unique" by art experts, the cabinet contains four rooms decorated with miniature figures and furniture by the author of Jane Eyre. It was last owned by Roger Warner, the legendary antiques dealer, whose private collection is to be auctioned by Christie's in January.

The "George II grained four-room 'baby' house circa 1750" was redecorated by Bronte in 1839 during her time as a governess for the Sidgwicks, a wealthy family based in Skipton, Yorkshire.

Bronte was deeply unhappy working for the family, who lived in an imposing house known as Stonegappe, which is thought to have provided the inspiration for Gateshead Hall, the house where Jane Eyre's story begins.

Bronte's redecoration of the doll's house is mentioned in a letter she wrote to her sister, Emily, in June 1839: "I said in my last letter that Mrs [Sidgwick] did not know me. I now begin to find she does not intend to know me; that she cares nothing...