Museums

Sun Yaoting was 8 when his father castrated him with a single swoop of a razor. The year was 1911, and China was in turmoil. Just a few months later rebels deposed the emperor, overturned centuries of tradition and established a republic. "Our boy has suffered for nothing," his father said, weeping and beating his breast, when he learned that the emperor had been overthrown. "They don't need eunuchs anymore!" Little did he know that the child nevertheless would earn a place in Chinese history.

London's National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland, which are campaigning to buy a $73.7-million Titian painting for the U.K. national collections, said they would announce the outcome in January. "There has been very good progress in both fundraising and the negotiation of terms for this important acquisition," the museums said in a press release Tuesday. "Our efforts to bring the campaign to a successful conclusion continue, and we will not be making any further announcements until January."

California-based multimedia artist Mike Rogers was finishing his photographs for an exhibition in Mexico City when he got an urgent e-mail from the curator: The show had been called off. The capital's contemporary art museums were broke and shutting down. The message was exaggerated. Museums are not closing -- yet. But across Mexico City's eclectic art world, museum directors, curators, artists and performers are bracing for a round of recession-triggered budget cuts that could prove devastating.

Betty Jane Williams never crashes and burns. She was unshakable the time the DC-3 she was working on as a flight attendant was struck by lightning and then dropped 1,000 feet, sending passengers -- and their lunches -- hurling all over the cabin. She didn't bat an eye when she was a World War II WASP pilot test-flying a supposedly repaired Army plane when its still-damaged wings sent it into a spin and then into a 9,500-foot dive.

If there were a list of the geekiest landmarks to visit in Seattle, RE-PC would be near the top. It's the place that old computers go to die. Most are disassembled for parts, stripped down like wrecked cars at a junkyard. Some are recycled. But a select few escape. They make it to a tidy room in the corner of the folksy high-tech salvage shop. That's the site of the RE-PC Computer Museum.

Just after dawn broke in Southern California, teams of federal agents began serving search warrants on what might seem unlikely targets for criminal investigation: four local art museums. "One of the agents said this was a raid of some kind, and I told myself, 'Hey, my God, this is the Bowers, one of the most respectable places,' " said a Bowers Museum landscape supervisor, who did not want to give his name.

A federal investigation into looted Asian antiquities at Southland museums has broadened to include a prominent Chicago industrialist and art collector who purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of allegedly stolen artifacts from a Cerritos arts dealer. On Thursday, the same day federal agents raided four Southern California museums suspected of displaying stolen art, authorities also searched the private museum of Barry MacLean, a trustee of the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago.

MADRID -- They were Picasso's own favorites and this is the first time -- and possibly the last -- they will leave Paris together. Making the most of refurbishing work at the Picasso Museum in Paris, Madrid's Reina Sofia art museum has brought together what are considered to be the Spanish artist's own favorites and the monumental "Guernica" in a breathtaking 400-piece show to run until May 5. "It's a show of Picasso's Picassos," said Reina Sofia's new director, Manuel Borja-Villel.

This wisp of a town owes its existence to Chinese laborers who panned gold in the mid-1800s and laid railroad tracks linking Utah and Sacramento. Yet the immigrants were mostly ostracized, made to live in a wood-shack Chinatown that later was bulldozed to make way for Interstate 80. Now, their legacy is relegated to Larry De Leeuw's garage. On a recent afternoon, De Leeuw squeezed into a cubbyhole walled off from his power tools and bottle cap collection.

Nearly four decades after their deaths, four combat photographers received a museum burial Thursday as family, friends and former colleagues recalled how the men gave their lives to show the world "Vietnam as they saw it." A helicopter carrying the four photographers was shot down over a mountainside in southern Laos on Feb. 10, 1971. Human remains were recovered in 1998, along with wreckage including camera parts, film and broken watches.