‘The Scream’ sells for record $119 million Edvard Munch’s famous painting goes for a scary $119,922,500 at a Sotheby’s auction. It’s a record for a work of art sold at auction. CNNMoney Reports Videos

  Although accounts of an aquatic beast living in Scotland’s Loch Ness date back 1,500 years, the modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster is born when a sighting makes local news on May 2, 1933. The newspaper Inverness Courier related an account of a local couple who claimed to have seen “an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface.” The story of the “monster” (a moniker chosen by the Courier editor) became a media phenomenon, with London newspapers sending correspondents to Scotland and a circus offering a 20,000 pound sterling reward for capture of the beast. Loch Ness, located in the Scottish Highlands, has the largest volume of…

“Anthony and Cleopatra” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1885 Who Was Cleopatra? Mythology, propaganda, Liz Taylor and the real Queen of the Nile By Amy Crawford Smithsonian.com The struggle with her teenage brother over the throne of Egypt was not going as well as Cleopatra VII had hoped. In 49 B.C., Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII—also her husband and, by the terms of their father’s will, her co-ruler—had driven his sister from the palace at Alexandria after Cleopatra attempted to make herself the sole sovereign. The queen, then in her early twenties, fled to Syria and returned with a mercenary army, setting up camp just outside the capital. Meanwhile, pursuing a military rival who…

Many of us are familiar with the quote by George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We may remember his sage advice in a different variation, since quotes, like whispers travelling through children’s’ ears, can be altered, or even restated and credited to another, but the gist has remained the same. If we choose to ignore past events and the lessons surrounding those events, then we will go down the same path of falls, bumps, and in extreme cases, catastrophic disaster. But this famous axiom is not simple to apply, as we discovered in the recent financial debacle of 2008. One reason for the…