A 2,500-year-old Egyptian mummy came out of his coffin Friday to undergo cleaning and restoration at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The mummy known as Padihershef has been on display at the third oldest general hospital in the United States since it received him as a gift from the city of Boston in 1823 as a medical oddity. He is one of the first complete mummies brought to the United States.

Nearly half a century after his death, New York's Museum of Modern Art will pay homage to celebrated French architect and designer Le Corbusier in a major exhibit that opens next week.

The extensive show will focus on the way Le Corbusier viewed and observed different landscapes throughout his career, featuring his early watercolors and models of his large-scale projects.

Australia has been challenged to match France's promotion of Aboriginal art after the inauguration of a landmark work in Paris.

Gija artist Lena Nyadbi's Dayiwul Lirlmim (Barramundi Scales) will be seen by millions of visitors to the French capital for decades to come as a result of a decision to install a hugely enlarged version of her abstract representation of a traditional dreaming story on the roof of a museum that sits directly under the Eiffel Tower.

She has led Moscow's renowned Pushkin Museum for over half a century, helped Russians discover the art of her friend Marc Chagall and battled to bring late impressionist art out of the vaults and into public view.

And at the age of 91, the doyenne of Russia's museum directors Irina Antonova shows no sign of letting up.

A new highway touted as a way to ease Beirut's notorious traffic has angered residents and activists who say it will destroy rare old houses that survived Lebanon's 15-year civil war.

The Fouad Boutros highway overpass is a long-stalled project, dating back to before the 1975-1990 civil war, and intended to route unnecessary traffic away from some of the city's most congested areas.

Egypt's Al-Azhar institute said on Thursday that legal measures were underway to recover a Koranic manuscript taken from Cairo in the 18th century during Napoleon's invasion.

French auction house Osenat withdrew the manuscript after the Egyptian embassy in Paris lobbied against its sale.

It may sound like an unlikely No. 1 best-seller for any country, but in Norway — one of the most secular nations in an increasingly godless Europe — the runaway popularity of the Bible has caught the country by surprise. The Scriptures, in a new Norwegian language version, even outpaced "Fifty Shades of Grey" to become Norway's best-selling book.

The sudden burst of interest in God's word has also spread to the stage, with a six-hour play called "Bibelen," Norwegian for "the Bible," drawing 16,000 people in a three-month run that recently ended at one of Oslo's most prominent theaters.

A rare wooden cabinet that was part of the Chinese imperial collection has sold for 93.15 million yuan ($15.2 million) at auction, auction house Poly said Wednesday.

The imposing three-meter (10-feet) high piece of furniture comprises four parts with finely carved dragons and lotuses on the doors.

At the farthest end of the Great Wall, Yang Yongfu limps along the section he arduously restored, in effect "privatizing" it and putting himself on a collision course with the authorities.

The farmer spent five million yuan ($800,000) and years of backbreaking work renovating several hundred meters of the national symbol deep in northwestern China, turning it into a tourist site.

Brazil's capital is well known for the modern architecture of its designer, the late Oscar Niemeyer. But mystic types come for a different kind of thrill, like communicating with the spirits.

The greater Brasilia area has around nearly 1,000 worship sites for every possible faith in the country with, at least nominally, the world's largest Catholic populatio -- and esoteric rites and mediums are part of the mix.