A rare colorless diamond found in the South African is set to be auctioned off in Hong Kong in late May. The 101. 27-carat gem, which was unveiled on Tuesday, is the largest colorless diamond to appear at auction in twenty years and will reportedly fetch no less than $6 million.

Paintings by Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh, which were stolen last week in one of the world's largest art heists, were recovered in an abandoned car in Zurich, Switzerland. The two paintings, worth an estimated $64 million dollars (44 million euros), were stolen from an museum in Zurich, but police say the artworks were found in good condition at the back seat of a car parked at a psychiatric hospital in the city.

Two paintings were stolen from a Brazilian museum, including a Picasso, when thieves broke in Thursday morning. The break in lasted a total of three minutes, but that was enough for the thieves to make off with Picasso's "Portrait of Suzanne Bloch. " Candido Portinari's "O Lavrador de Cafe" was also stolen from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art. Investigators say the thieves appear to be professionals and used a car jack to pry into a metal pull-down gate over the museum's front door. Then, they broke two glass doors and took the paintings from the museum's second floor.

The U. S. Embassy in Manila has come to the aid of "blistered and crackled" paintings made by the foremost Filipino artist in the lobby of the Philippine General Hospital, the country's first public hospital. Willie Estonato, a painting conservator from the National Museum said, the murals created by Carlos "Botong" Francisco in 1953, were already on the brink of collapsing.

A Cambodian-born French woman who left a smudge of lip stick on a white canvas painting she is suspected of kissing faces criminal prosecution. The woman, who is herself a painter, stands accused of "damage to a work of art," by kissing it and leaving her lipstick on an otherwise bone white canvas. The painting, valued at $2 million, was on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon.