LONDON (AFP) ― Britain’s greatest living artist, David Hockney, has swapped the Californian sunshine for the landscape of his native Yorkshire for a blockbuster exhibition which goes on show this week.Hockney has portrayed country lanes and hedgerows in a riot of colour that leaps off the wall at the Royal Academy of Arts, a short walk from Piccadilly Circus in London.In the show, “A Bigger Picture,” Hockney and his team also show the countryside shifting through the seasons on a giant bank of v

NEW YORK (AP) ― Opera superstar Placido Domingo is getting ready to conduct 35 New York City schoolchildren who are studying music five days a week under a program inspired by Venezuela’s acclaimed youth orchestra program, El Sistema.Domingo will conduct the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders from Public School 129 in Harlem and Public School 152 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, at a fundraiser Wednesday for their after-school music program, called Harmony.The children will play Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus

LOS ANGELES ― Everywhere you look, people are going about their lives to the tunes of their own personal soundtrack. They sweat through “YMCA” at the gym, pound out programming code to Rammstein’s brutal beats and nurse broken hearts with a mournful Bach cello concerto.In the last few decades, technology has transformed music from a social gathering experience to an intensely solitary one in which donning a pair of headphones in public is equivalent to shouting, “Leave me alone!”But in a move th

NEW YORK (AP) ― Producers of Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’’ have fired back in their legal fight with one-time director Julie Taymor, claiming the woman who they once called a visionary later failed to fulfill her legal obligations, wrote a “disjointed’’ and “hallucinogenic’’ musical, and refused to collaborate on changes when the $75 million show was in trouble.In a countersuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Taymor and her company

Kim Byung-hyun, a former All-Star closer in Major League Baseball, has signed with a South Korean club.The Nexen Heroes of the Korea Baseball Organization announced that they have inked the right-handed submariner to a one-year deal worth 500 million won ($436,870), with a club option for 100 million won. The team also gave him 1 billion won as a signing bonus.Kim, who turns 33 on Thursday, played for the Rakuten Eagles in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball last season and was released in Nove

LONDON (AP) ― Danny Gabbidon headed in Shaun Wright-Phillips’ corner kick in the 73rd minute, and Queens Park Rangers beat the third-tier MK Dons 1-0 in a replay Tuesday night to reach a fourth-round matchup against London rival Chelsea in the FA Cup.Bolton also reached the last 32 of soccer’s oldest knockout competition, defeating fourth-tier Macclesfield 2-0 on goals by Kevin Davies in the first minute and Martin Petrov in the 26th. Bolton will play Swansea next in another all-Premier League m

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) ― The outgoing German soccer federation president says it’s time for gay players to come out.Theo Zwanziger called on gay players “to have the courage to declare themselves,” although he conceded it was surely difficult to acknowledge one’s homosexuality within a team. He pointed to the example of Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit, who came out years ago.Speaking at a discussion on the subject organized by the federation, Zwanziger said Tuesday that society was more understandi

TORONTO (AP) ― Daniel Alfredsson and Jason Spezza scored and Craig Anderson made 37 saves and the Ottawa Senators earned a 3-2 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs on Tuesday.Anderson has a 7-1-1 record and .945 save percentage this month. The Senators have climbed to fifth in the Eastern Conference and hold a nine-point advantage over the ninth-place Leafs.Kyle Turris also scored for Ottawa, which hasn’t dropped consecutive games in regulation since Nov. 9 and 11.Matthew Lombardi and Joffrey Lupul

Korean stocks closed 0.02 percent lower on Wednesday as investors turned gun-shy following the previous session’s rally, analysts said. The local currency gathered ground against the U.S. dollar.The benchmark Korea Composite Stock Price Index fell 0.35 points to 1,892.39, after jumping 1.8 percent on Tuesday.Trading volume was moderate at 421.6 million shares worth 5.95 trillion won ($5.21 billion), with losers outnumbering gainers 461 to 362.“It seems the KOSPI is testing technical resistance a