Four paintings by JMW Turner depicting 18th and 19th century commercial whaling and their possible link to "Moby Dick" are the focus of an exhibit opening Tuesday at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Turner's Whaling Pictures" features works done in the 1840s as the Briton Turner was near the end of his career and life.

Egyptian prosecutors have detained a member of a group of satirists that posted a video mocking the government, a prosecution official and his lawyer said Sunday, amid a wide-ranging crackdown on dissidents.

An Iranian director sentenced to 223 lashes for making a film that has never been officially shown in his homeland said Friday he just wanted to be left alone to work rather than "be turned into a hero."

Russian maestro Valery Gergiev on Thursday will conduct his orchestra in the ancient theater of Syria's ravaged Palmyra, only weeks after it was recaptured from the Islamic State's grip.

The concert will bring music to the ancient site that IS notoriously used to hold public executions after it overran Palmyra last year.

A heated national debate over access to bathrooms by transgenders is sweeping the United States, with schools and businesses grappling with the issue that has become a hot topic in the presidential campaign.

The so-called "bathroom battle" erupted after North Carolina in March became the first U.S. state to require transgender people to use restrooms in public buildings that match the sex on their birth certificate, rather than the gender by which they identify.

An iconic image from World War II, depicting Marines raising the U.S. flag over Iwo Jima in Japan, is undergoing new scrutiny after it emerged one of the troops in the picture may have been misidentified.

In a statement late Tuesday, the U.S. Marine Corps said it was reviewing information provided by the Smithsonian Channel related to the photograph, taken in February 1945 during the bloody battle for the Japanese island.

The original artwork for the last two pages of the Tintin comic book "King Ottokar's Scepter" sold for a total of 1.046 million euros ($1.2 million) at auction Saturday in Paris.

"This is only the second time a Tintin plate has exceeded a million euros," Eric Leroy, comic book expert at French auction house Artcurial, told AFP.

Colombia became the fourth South American country to allow same-sex marriage when the constitutional court definitively legalized it on Thursday.

The Catholic country follows Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in formally recognizing the rights of same-sex couples to marry.

The U.S. Embassy donated American books to the Zouk Mikael and Cultural Center, a press release said on Thursday.

U.S. Chargé d’Affaires ad interim Ambassador Richard H. Jones presented 250 books and educational resources to the Zouk Mikael Youth and Cultural Center, it said.

Some were buried, others riddled with bullet holes, yet others dumped in old depots as the glorious periods they were crafted to commemorate came to an end.

But Berlin authorities have now rescued 100 statues and monuments from neglect and disrepair, assembling them in an exhibition to tell the city's chequered history that spanned royal rule, Nazism and the Cold War.