Located in the city’s Royal Palace, the Grünes Gewölbe, or Green Vault, was started as a dedicated effort for storing precious metals, art, and artifacts collected by Saxon elector August the Strong, who later become king of Poland from 1723 and 1729.

Five members of a criminal gang broke into the Green Vault in a nighttime heist in November 2019. They were sentenced to six years in prison for stealing the trove of 18th-century jewelry last year.

The group, known as the Remmo Clan, a family crime network operating in Germany, smashed the glass in the display cases using an axe, pocketed 21 pieces of jewelry, and fled within five minutes. The looted Saxon royal artifacts contain more than 4,300 diamonds and is collectively valued at €114 million (about $125 million). The thieves were ultimately sentenced on charges of armed robbery, aggravated arson, and grievous bodily harm.

The Green Vault announced the public reopening of the gems and other relics with an exhibition restored to “almost all its glory”, with the majority of the jewels having been recovered.

“The jewels are presented exactly as they were returned to the [Dresden State Art Collections] — with damage that is barely visible, although in need of restoration,” Marion Ackermann, director general of the Dresden State Art Collections, said in a statement.

Following the heist, the regional court allowed the recovered artifacts to be returned to the museum for display.

“In 2019, criminal clans from Berlin took possession of our cultural heritage,” Saxony Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer said in German in a post on X. “But we fought for our treasure!”

Though the breast star of the Polish Order of the White Eagle decorated in diamonds and a diamond-covered sword were recovered by German law enforcement authorities in late 2022, a large breast bow of Queen Amalie Auguste, made of 611 small diamonds, silver and gold, and an epaulet that includes the so-called Saxon White diamond, is still among the items missing.

An international commission of experts is expected to convene on how to restore the recovered jewels.

Robinson broke the sport’s racial barriers as the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in 1947. He played for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues before joining the Brooklyn Dodgers. He is considered as much a sports legend as a civil rights icon. Robinson died in 1972.

The new statue depicts Robinson carrying a bat over his right shoulder. At a night ceremony, the League 42 youth baseball league unveiled the latest statue at the same spot where the old statue was removed.

The original was stolen just after midnight on January 25, according to police. Days later firefighters responded to a call about a trash can fire at another park; after extinguishing the flames, authorities said they identified pieces of the statue.

The man who pleaded guilty to stealing the statue was sentenced to 18 months in prison and $41,500 in restitution for the theft on Friday, the Associated Press reported.

Since the original mold was still usable, a duplicate was made with funds raised from a GoFundMe campaign, including $100,000 from Major League Baseball. Donations also went to improving the surrounding plaza and the nonprofit’s facilities and programming.

Roughly 600 children play in the urban youth baseball league, which takes its namesake from Robinson’s number with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

“I’m just simply amazed by the support we’ve gotten from so many since this heinous act happened back in January,” League 42 executive director Bob Lutz said at the ceremony.

Göbekli Tepe is a 12,000-year-old temple-like complex that contains intricate carvings depicting symbols. Researchers believe that the carvings were developed to record comet fragments that hit the Earth roughly 13,000 years ago, according to a study published in Time and Mind on July 24.

If the V-shaped symbols carved in the pillars each represent one day, the study posits, there are enough marks to account for a solar calendar of 365 days on one of the pillars. It consists of 12 lunar months, including 11 extra days, with a special demarcation indicating the summer solstice. Other symbols with similar markings around the neck are thought by the researchers to represent deities.

Researchers are sure, however, that the engravings on the monument track both moon phases and sun cycles, making this site the world’s earliest lunisolar calendar by more than a millennium.

The comet strike brought with it a miniature Ice Age that lasted for more than a millennium and led to the extinction of many large animals. As such, early humans may have been noting this lifestyle change from hunting and gathering to agriculture and the birth of civilization in the Fertile Crescent of West Asia.

A previous study published in the journal Earth Science Reviews in 2021 indicated that these comet fragments likely spurred the growth of human civilization in modern Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Additionally, per this latest study, a pillar found near the Göbekli Tepe site seems to depict the Taurid meteor shower, which is believed to be the source of the fragments. That meteor shower rained down for 27 days.

Cash was born February 26, 1932, in Kingsland, a small town roughly 60 miles south of Little Rock, Arkansas. During his lifetime, he sold 90 million records worldwide. His music spanning the genres of country, blues, rock, and gospel, Cash was inducted into Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980, and into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. He received numerous awards, among them, 13 Grammys and 9 Country Music Association Awards. Cash died in 2003 at age 71 from diabetes-related complications.

His statue joins that of another Arkansas native, Daisy Bates, a civil rights leader who headed the state’s NAACP chapter and mentored the Black students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine, and integrated Central High School in 1957. Her statue was unveiled on May 8 in National Statuary Hall.

The two replace monuments of 19th-century American Bar Association president and Confederate sympathizer Uriah M. Rose and James P. Clarke, a late 18th-century and early 19th-century governor and US senator, and a white supremacist. Clarke’s racist remarks included calling on the Democratic Party to preserve “white standards of civilization.”

The work of Little Rock sculptor Kevin Kresse, Cash’s eight-foot-tall statue depicts him with a guitar across his back and a Bible in hand. The unveiling is slated to occur in Emancipation Hall September 24.

This change follows an ongoing debate that emerged over the display of Confederate statues in 2020 about who or what is being publicly memorialized in the United States.

Williams announced his wishes to reinstate the arts competitions for the 2028 edition at his star-studded Louis Vuitton event on Thursday, the night before this year’s opening ceremony, in the city of lights. While this revelation may seem out of left field, some in living memory may recall the inclusion of arts in the modern adaptation of the Olympics from 1912 to 1948.

The Olympics started as an ancient religious and athletic tradition among the Greeks in honor of the god Zeus. The ancient games, on which the present-day event is modeled, boasted athletic competitions such as running and discus throwing, and ended with the slaughter of 100 oxen. They took place every four years from 776 BCE through 393 CE, when they were banned by the Roman emperor Theodosius I as a pagan festival.

The Olympics were later revived by the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who was inspired by the ancient version, with the first modern edition taking place in Athens in 1896. Though Coubertin saw the arts as essential to his vision, he could not convince local organizers for the first few iterations.

Not long after, however, beginning at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the modern games came to include the arts. Medals were awarded across five art categories, including architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. Between 1912 and 1948 juries awarded a total of 151 medals to original works in the fine arts that drew inspiration from the sports.

That last caveat—requiring the arts competitors to submit works intertwined with sport—limited the consistency and scope of the fine arts competitions, as the Olympics expanded its overall reach to become a premiere international event. The arts competitions were finally cancelled in 1948 and, four years later, a request to bring them back was denied. Those 151 medals that had been awarded were officially stricken from the Olympic record and do not count currently factor into countries’ medal counts.

Though Williams did not expand on how he or others might conceive of an arts competition within the Olympics, it’s clear that reviving them would not only take a big effort but would also require the support of those active among the categories in each respective the field.

As recent studies on arts workers reveal gaps in professional continuation and low wages, support for those in the field could be a welcome change and an opportunity for impactful discovery.

When Warhol was a brand ambassador for the now defunct tech company Commodore, he created the artworks on an early Amiga 1000 home computer as part of a promotion at New York’s Lincoln Center.

In her 2019 memoir Face It, Harry described how her portrait came to fruition: “Andy called and asked me to model for a portrait he was going to create live, at Lincoln Center, as a promotion for the Commodore Amiga computer. It was a pretty amazing event.”

She continued, “they had a full orchestra and a large board set up with a bunch of technicians in lab coats. The techs programmed away with all the Warhol colors, as Andy designed and painted my portrait. I hammed it up some for the cameras, turning toward Andy, running my hand through my hair, and asking in a suggestive Marilyn voice, ‘Are you ready to paint me?’ Andy was pretty hilarious in his usual flat-affect way, as he sparred with the Commodore host.”

Harry has said of the works, “I think there are only two copies of this computer-generated Warhol in existence and I have one of them.”

Now, the location of the second portrait has been revealed. For nearly 40 years, it was displayed in the home of Commodore’s digital technician Jeff Bruette, who taught the artist how to use the computer.

Bruette is planning a private sale of the Harry portrait and original Amiga disk containing eight images Warhol made during the Amiga World interview, plus an experimental image created during the production of the MTV show Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, Page Six reported on Monday.

“It’s been almost 40 years since I worked with Warhol—it was a life-changing assignment,” Bruette said. “For just as long, any time someone has seen the portrait of Debbie hanging on my wall, or learned that I was ‘that guy who worked with Andy,’ especially after the recent explosion of NFTs and digital art, anyone who’s heard the story has been completely riveted. I thought it was time the world got to interact with this extraordinary artwork the way it was meant to be experienced.”

Bruette added that “parting with this collection now gives me the chance to help find it the right home. And, to be honest, could make retirement just a little bit more comfortable.”

Though the price for the Harry portrait remains undisclosed, but the Post speculated that it could sell “for potential millions.” A series of five NFTs made using restored Amiga images from obsolete floppy disks in 2014 fetched $3.38 million at auction with Christie’s in 2021.

In addition to the Harry works, Warhol made digital images of a Campbell’s soup can and flowers, and a copy of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485–86). At the time, he told Amiga World magazine that he planned to distribute the images, but he never succeeded in doing so.

One of the oldest, largest, and most complex monasteries, the monastery dates back to the 4th century CE. The site was home to the first monastic community in the Holy Land. Though it has been on the organization’s tentative heritage list since 2012, its status was fast-tracked using emergency procedures.

A native to the area, Saint Hilarion founded the eponymous site, which boasts two churches, a baptism hall, a burial ground, and a public cemetery, as well as an audience hall and dining rooms. After it was damaged, the monastery was ultimately abandoned in the early 7th century CE. It was later rediscovered by local archaeologists in 1999.

Conservation projects undertaken by the Switzerland-based foundation Aliph and the British Council (led by Première Urgence Internationale) have helped to protect and restore the site.

“UNESCO expresses deep concern about the impact of the ongoing conflict on cultural heritage, particularly in the Gaza Strip,” a statement released by UNESCO explained, adding, “The organization urges all involved parties to strictly adhere to international law, emphasizing that cultural property should not be targeted or used for military purposes, as it is considered civilian infrastructure.”

Since the start of the conflict last October, more than 39,000 Gazans have been killed, according to the local health ministry, with most of the strip’s 2.3 million people being forced to evacuate their homes.

There have been more than 100 cultural landmarks and historic sites destroyed in Gaza due to Israeli airstrikes. The monastery joins four other landmarks in Palestine on UNESCO’s World Heritage list, which offers technical and financial assistance towards the protection and rehabilitation of each site.

The Trellis Art Fund, a New York–based private foundation, said it had specifically awarded two of the awards to working parents in recognition of the challenges they often face.

“Making a grant unrestricted is akin to funding basic science research,” Corina Larkin, Trellis’s executive director, said in a statement. “We wanted to relieve our grantees from the financial challenges of being an artist at every stage of life, and allow them to deploy resources on their own timeline. More than anything, artists need time, space, and stability to be in the studio and engage deeply with their work.”

More than 75 curators, historians, artists, and art world professionals from around the world were invited to nominate up to three artists earlier this year in January. Any artist eligible to work in the United States was considered. In February, those who were nominated were then invited to apply for the award, after which an anonymous jury then decided the final 12 recipients from a pool of 157 applicants.

Those selected work across a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video, performance
and social practice, and hail from a number of different locales. The funds are unrestricted and can be used to fund personal or professional needs.

Speaking on behalf of the anonymous jury, Trellis Art Fund advisory board member and sculptor Arlene
Shechet explained, “There is nothing simple or straightforward about the process of elimination and
selection, but we are immensely pleased and grateful that, in this inaugural year for Trellis,
twelve astoundingly dedicated and talented artists will receive substantial, no strings attached,
funds towards realizing their dreams and sharing their visions.”

The recipients are as follows:

Candida Alvarez, Chicago, IL
American Artist, New York, NY
Ja’Tovia Gary, Dallas, TX
Every Ocean Hughes, New York, NY
Autumn Knight, New York, NY
Young Joon Kwak, Los Angeles, CA
Lorraine O’Grady, New York, NY
Paul Pfeiffer, New York, NY
Ronny Quevedo, New York, NY*
Alison Saar, Los Angeles, CA
Shizu Saldamando, Los Angeles, CA*
Jorge González Santos, San Juan, PR

*Artist parents with children under 12 years old.

Along with a year-long studio space at London’s Studio Voltaire, the prize comes with a £25,000 ($32,522) stipend for accommodations and living costs, a production and travel budget, and a professional development program.

The award was started in 2021 with the intention of highlighting “creative thinking and individuality within contemporary art practice” while also working “to increase and strengthen equitable representation and access, and amplify artistic voices across class, race, gender, sexuality and disability.”

Hong Kong-based artist and independent publisher Beatrix Pang was the inaugural recipient.

Key figures in the Indian art scene were invited to nominate twelve artists to apply for the award. Applications were then selected by art historian and curator Devika Singh, Studio Voltaire director Joe Scotland, and curator Dot Zhihan Jia.

Potnis explores the public and private influences of global politics and economics between painting, installation, and time-based media. Her work questions the boundaries of familial, societal, governmental, temporal systems in which we are ingrained.

“It will be an invaluable opportunity to provide new contexts for comparative readings of some key issues I’ve been exploring, as well as to research and develop a new body of work that responds to these uncertain and trying times”, Potnis said in a statement. “The award will offer me a place for reflection and interaction within a thriving community of artists, activists, curators and audiences. I am excited for the invaluable exchange of ideas and experiences.”

Marking her first project in the United Kingdom, Potnis begins her residency in October.

Additionally, two years of support is given to seven UK-based artists via rent-free studio spaces, professional development opportunities, and bursaries. The recipients for the 2023–25 award are Babajide Brian, Maz Murray, Emily Pope, Shamica Ruddock, Meera Shakti Osborne, Nick Smith and Ossie Williams.

The archaeological efforts, which focused on a lesser-studied forest called the Balam Kú Biosphere Reserve, were spearheaded by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). The area covers roughly 54 square miles of rough terrain. Given that terrain and its difficulty to farm, fewer settlements and structures have been found there previously.

“The inevitable impression is that the Maya culture of this region that we have just explored was noticeably less elaborate than that of Petén, to the south, and the regions of Chenes and Chactún, to the north and east,” Ivan Šprajc, an archaeologist from the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, said in a statement.

Using LiDAR laser remote sensing technology, researchers were able to record the topographical data of these previously hidden structures. They discovered a main plaza with a pyramid construction and a drainage channel among a group of structures near Nadzcaan, which was initially found in the 1990s.

Another large building believed to have been a center for civic and ceremonial duties, measuring at 43 feet tall, was also revealed. Though the building’s purpose is still unclear, experts believe the space would have held “socio-political importance,” given its size.

A ball court constructed over top of a substructure that may date to the Early Classic period (200 CE–600 CE) was additionally identified at the eastern part of the site.

Several structures located at a third site on a natural hill that dates to the Late Postclassic period (1250–1524) include a 52-foot-tall pyramid surrounded by a flint point, ceramics, and the fragment of an animal leg. This site would have operated just a few centuries before Spanish conquest and demonstrates how these cultures lived despite political downturn in the Central Lowlands.