A rare piece of artwork painted by Vincent van Gogh weeks before his death sold for $61.8 million Tuesday at a sale kicking off New York City's fall auctions of impressionist and modern art.

The 1890 painting, "Still Life, Vase With Daisies and Poppies," had expected to fetch between $30 million and $50 million at Sotheby's evening sale in Manhattan.

To download or not to download, perchance to stream... that is the question a new digital project hopes to solve by making performances of Shakespeare's plays available to a global audience on demand for the first time.

London's Globe Theater has made over 50 productions available to download as full-length high-definition films on its dedicated online platform, in what it said Tuesday was a world first.

Japanese sushi maestro Jiro Ono, whose creations were recently enjoyed by U.S. President Barack Obama and are reputedly the best in the world, warned Tuesday of a sea change in ingredients due to overfishing.

"I can't imagine at all that sushi in the future will be made of the same materials we use today," the 89-year-old master told the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan.

The United Arab Emirates contains the world's tallest building, an artificial indoor ski slope and man-made islands shaped like the world. Dubai's fleet of police cars includes a $2.5 million Bugatti Veyron and a $500,000 Lamborghini Aventador.

Look past the blinding glitz, though, and you discover a gulf separating the elite and their riches from most Emiratis. Yet in contrast to much of the world, a note of complaint is seldom heard here, and the reason is simple: Most Emiratis live lives of comfort that they owe to a bounty of perks and benefits from the government.

Venezuela is known for its obsession with beauty contests and plastic surgery. Now, the latest fashion rage is bulletproof clothes and cars to protect against rampant violent crime.

Miguel Caballero, a Colombian designer known for his bulletproof clothing, told AFP that over the past seven months up to 30 percent of his sales are with people sporting his style-meets-safety duds in Venezuela.

Powerful herby coffee, sun-dried fish and succulent beef from Ankole cattle are just some of the Ugandan delicacies in a mushrooming movement across Africa to safeguard traditional foods.

Slow Food, a global grassroots organisation that promotes "good, clean and fair food", is spreading its reach across Africa after making its first inroads on the continent a decade ago.

The Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi offered a peek Sunday of several artworks which will be displayed at its Guggenheim museum, set to open in 2017.

Visitors got a glimpse of 19 out of the 200 artworks acquired by oil-rich Abu Dhabi that will be on public display from Wednesday until January at the museum.

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has chided his country for shirking responsibility for its World War II aggression and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in an interview published Monday.

Speaking to the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, the 65-year-old author said: "No one has taken real responsibility for the 1945 war end or the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. I feel so."

The Israeli cabinet approved a new law Sunday that would enable easier conversions to Judaism, a move advocates hope will encourage hundreds of thousands of "religionless" Israelis to become Jewish.

The new law, a ministerial compromise following a bill initiated by Elazar Stern of Justice Minister Tzipi Livni's HaTnuah movement, stipulates that the chief rabbi of each Israeli city would be able to form and head a conversion court, pending conditions to be set by the chief rabbinate.

North and South Korea have never found dialogue easy, but academics from both sides currently meeting in Pyongyang are trying to steer things in the right direction by at least getting them to speak the same language.

A 25-year old effort to produce a unified Korean language dictionary is, its compilers say, entering the home stretch in its bid to bridge a growing gap in vocabulary, if not ideology.