Millions celebrate by dancing, exchanging food and drink, and smearing each other with colorful powder …

new york — Ghostbusting is still a good business.  “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” collected $45.2 million in ticket sales over the weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, handing Sony Pictures the studio’s first No. 1 film since last summer.  The opening weekend for “Frozen Empire,” in 4,345 theaters, was nearly exactly the …

MONTREAL — American figure skating star Ilia Malinin is a world champion — and a world-record holder. Malinin put on a dominant display that included a jaw-dropping six quad jumps — including his patented quad axel — to snag the men’s singles crown Saturday night at the world championships. After placing …

NEW YORK — Babar author Laurent de Brunhoff, who revived his father’s popular picture book series about an elephant-king and presided over its rise to a global, multimedia franchise, has died. He was 98. De Brunhoff, a Paris native who moved to the U.S. in the 1980s, died Friday at his …

ROME — Maurizio Pollini, a Grammy-winning Italian pianist who performed frequently at La Scala opera house in Milan, has died. He was 82. Pollini died Saturday, La Scala said in a statement. The announcement didn’t specify a cause of death, but Pollini had been forced to cancel a concert at the …

LONDON — England’s new men’s soccer team shirt is causing a bit of a stir. It’s not just the price that’s vexing some. The decision by Nike to change the color of the St. George’s Cross on the shirt from the traditional red and white has even prompted the prime minister …

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Seoul — As a South Korean baseball fan, Shin Jae-woong had many reasons to watch the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres open the Major League Baseball season this week in Seoul. These are the first ever regular season MLB games in baseball-loving South Korea. And the games feature multiple …

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LOS ANGELES — Usher was named entertainer of the year at the 55th annual NAACP Awards on Saturday night, which highlighted works by entertainers and writers of color. After Usher accepted his award at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, the superstar R&B singer spoke about being thankful about the journey …

Warsaw, Poland — A Russian-Belarusian rock band that denounces Moscow’s Ukraine invasion returned to the stage this week, voicing defiance after being detained in Thailand in January and threatened with deportation to Russia.  The band, Bi-2, formed in the 1980s in Belarus when it was part of the Soviet Union, left …

Seoul — South Korea’s “Squid Game” actor O Yeong-su has been found guilty of sexual misconduct, a local court said Friday, after he was charged with assaulting a woman in 2017. The 79-year-old in 2022 became the first South Korean to win a Golden Globe Award for best supporting actor in a series for …

SANTA FE, N.M. — Defense attorneys for Alec Baldwin urged a New Mexico judge on Thursday to dismiss a grand jury indictment against the actor in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the Western movie “Rust.” The indictment in January charged Baldwin with involuntary manslaughter in the …

This month’s Academy Awards ceremony saw a big first for Ukraine as Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol” won the best documentary Oscar. The film is a first-person account of being in the eastern Ukrainian city during the first weeks of Russia’s invasion. Khrystyna Shevchenko talked with Chernov. Anna Rice …

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation Wednesday that would force the popular TikTok video app to either separate from its Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance or sell the U.S. version of the software. The bipartisan Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act “gives TikTok six months to eliminate …

The Nigerian film industry, often referred to as Nollywood, is the second largest moviemaker in the world in terms of volume, and is making strides both in terms of art and in popularity at the box office. Timothy Obiezu reports from Abuja. …

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Dohuk, Iraq — Huddled in the back of a van, Rebin Pishtiwan carefully scans one yellowed page after another, as part of his mission to digitize historic Kurdish books at risk of disappearing. Seen as the world’s largest stateless people, the Kurds are an ethnic group of between 25 million and …

Los Angeles — As Universal Pictures prepared for a big night at the Academy Awards with “Oppenheimer,” the studio also celebrated the No. 1 debut of “Kung Fu Panda 4,” which collected $58.3 million in domestic theaters over the weekend, according to estimates Sunday. “Kung Fu Panda 4,” the first film …

Los Angeles — Hollywood’s glitterati gather on Sunday to celebrate the best performances in film at the annual Academy Awards, a ceremony expected to turn into a toast to blockbuster atomic bomb drama “Oppenheimer.” Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel returns for the fourth time to emcee the film industry’s highest honors …

New York — Six years ago, Nachiket Chanchani visited Angkor Wat for the first time. Inspired, the architectural historian began thinking about the relationship between the complexities of modern post-genocide Cambodia and the ancient temple complex. Chanchani, an associate art history professor at the University of Michigan, kept reflecting on Angkor …