MAD magazine leaving newsstands after 67-year run
SAN FRANCISCO – MAD, the longrunning satirical magazine that influenced “Weird Al” Yankovic and the writers of “The Simpsons,” among many, will be leaving newsstands after its August issue. Really. The magazine will still be available in comic shops and through mail to subscribers. But after its fall issue it will just reprint previously published material. Illustrators and comedians, including one-time guest editor Yankovic, mourned its effective closure. “It’s pretty much the reason I turned out weird,” he wrote on Twitter.
CHICAGO – Holocaust survivor Eva Kor, who championed forgiveness even for those who carried out the Holocaust atrocities, died Thursday during a trip for a museum she founded, her son said. Kor was in Krakow, Poland, for a trip with the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana. Kor, a Jewish native of Romania, was sent in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where most of her family was killed. She and her twin sister survived but were subjected to inhumane medical experiments.
LONDON – Christie’s has auctioned off a 3,000-year-old stone sculpture of the famed boy pharaoh Tutankhamun despite protests from the Egyptian government. The brown quartzite head depicting King Tut sold for more than $5.9 million Thursday evening. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry had demanded that the auction house provide documents proving the statue’s ownership and said Egypt holds rights to the piece based on its laws. But Christie’s said it carried out “extensive due diligence” to verify the provenance of the statue.
ROME – Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Pope Francis for “substantive talks” at the Vatican on Thursday, and thanked the pontiff for discussions on a range of topics including Ukraine and the Catholic Church in Russia. Francis received Putin in an hourlong audience at the Vatican Apostolic Palace. The two addressed “various questions of relevance to the life of the Catholic Church in Russia,” the Vatican said in a statement. The Russian president also met with Italian government leaders.