Spartan Echo

  WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — One of Maya Angelou’s doctors says the poet and author is recovering at her North Carolina home following a brief hospitalization. Dr. Jeff Williamson of the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., says in letter dated Tuesday April 23, that, as leader of Angelou’s medical team, he has ordered [...]

  VALENCIA, Venezuela (AP) — It’s just after nightfall and the power is out again in untold hundreds of thousands — probably millions — of Venezuelan homes. If the government knows how many, it’s not saying. It hasn’t issued reports on problems in the public power grid since 2010. In Venezuela’s third-largest city, Pedro Martinez [...]

  ISLA NEGRA, Chile (AP) — The body of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda is being exhumed this weekend in an effort to clear up four decades of suspicion about how he died in the days after Chile’s military coup. A team of investigators is to begin digging on Sunday at Isla Negra, a rocky outcropping [...]

  LONDON (AP) — The material sat in a Florida storage facility for many years, apparently forgotten, until the storage company finally sold it off in bulk because payments had not been made. Only then did a buyer open the boxes and discover what is being dubbed “the lost archive” of the Beach Boys, one [...]

  NEW YORK (AP) — Paul McCartney is adding his voice to Tony Bennett’s campaign against gun violence. The former Beatle recorded a voice message that’s part of a text-to-call operation Wednesday for Bennett’s Voices Against Violence campaign. McCartney and others are encouraging Americans to send a text, which will lead to the singer’s message [...]

  CHICAGO (AP) — Hollywood came to Chicago on Thursday, April 11,  as actors, directors, film critics and studio presidents honored late movie reviewer Roger Ebert in his hometown. All of those who shared memories at the Chicago Theatre cheered Ebert as a champion of movies and a critic who used his influence to help [...]

   CINCINNATI (AP) — A Jesus portrait that has hung in a southern Ohio school district since 1947 was taken down Wednesday, because of concerns about the potential costs of a federal lawsuit against its display. The superintendent of Jackson City Schools said the decision was made after the district’s insurance company declined to cover [...]

   LONDON (AP) — A painting donated to Britain’s National Trust by the estate of a wealthy supporter has been identified as a Rembrandt self-portrait worth 20 million pounds ($30 million), the heritage body said Monday. The painting was given to the trust in 2010 by the estate of Edna, Lady Samuel of Wych Cross, [...]

  RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Long a cultural backwater, Rio de Janeiro has taken another leap toward becoming an art hot spot with this week’s opening of a museum built around one of the world’s premier collections of contemporary Latin American art. Casa Daros, a 12,000-square-meter (129,000-square-foot) space in an impeccably renovated 1866 mansion, [...]

   LONDON (AP) — A London neighborhood wants its Banksy back. A stencil by the famed, secretive graffiti artist of a young boy sewing Union Jack bunting on an antique sewing machine appeared on the side of a north London bargain store last May. Soon the gritty Turnpike Lane area was drawing art lovers keen [...]