Vandals have attacked and stolen several statues from the gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome including two works dating back to ancient Rome, the director of the French-owned palace told Agence France Presse on Wednesday.

"I am absolutely shocked by this act of vandalism," Eric de Chassey told AFP, saying that the vandals had come twice last week and again overnight Monday when they were disturbed by a guard.

The American surrealist painter and writer Dorothea Tanning, who was married to the late German painter Max Ernst, died on Tuesday in New York, a spokeswoman said. She was 101.

"It is my sad duty to announce that Dorothea Tanning has passed away. She died peacefully in her home," Pamela Johnson, director of the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Nobel-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska known for her philosophical and often humorously biting turn of phrase, died Wednesday at the age of 88 following a long battle with illness.

A heavy smoker, Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, passed away "peacefully, in her sleep" at her home in Krakow in southern Poland, her assistant Michal Rusinek announced.

An unlikely alliance between the native Moqoit people and leading Argentine scientists has thwarted plans to ship the world's second largest meteorite to Germany as a prestigious art exhibit.

The 37-ton space rock crashed to Earth as part of a meteor shower between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, forming a giant 48,000 square kilometer crater field in northeastern Argentina known as Campo del Cielo, or Field of the Sky.

The Mexican Museum in San Francisco is joining America's largest museum network.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports the museum of Latino art and culture on Tuesday becomes the city's first museum to join the Smithsonian Institution's Affiliations Program.

In a season where little grows in the Northeast, something in Brooklyn is doing just that, foot by foot.

The metal guts of what will be a sleek three-tiered glass box surrounding the Theatre for a New Audience's 299-seat stage have gone up in a former parking lot as part of the city's ambitious plan to create a new $650 million cultural district.

A large retrospective exhibition of Andy Warhol's artwork will tour five Asian cities over the next three years.

The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh says the exhibit will be the pop art icon's largest ever in Asia. It will include more than 300 paintings, photographs, screen prints, drawings and sculptures.

The Thomson Foundation of the UK will be announcing the winners of the Inquirer Award 2011 at a special Awards ceremony which will be held in Amman, Jordan on the 4th of February 2012.

"We received a total of 85 entries to the Print Media category," The foundation said in a press statement.

It was completed in 1930, a masterpiece of Modernism by legendary German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

But Villa Tugendhat's early history was rocked by the turbulence of the 20th Century: The Nazis seized it, then came World War II bombardments that smashed its windows. When the Soviet troops liberated Czechoslovakia, living space became a large stable. It has languished in disrepair ever since.

The daughter of disabled activist Ni Yulan said Tuesday police grabbed her at the airport in Beijing and barred her from leaving China to collect a rights award for her mother in the Netherlands.

The Netherlands had asked China to explain why Ni's daughter Dong Xuan was not allowed to go to the Hague to accept the 100,000-euro ($131,000) Human Rights Defenders Tulip award, an embassy spokesman said.