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Bank of America Corp said on Wednesday its quarterly profit surged by nearly $3 billion as revenue increased and mortgage losses plunged, the clearest sign yet the bank was shaking off the impact of the financial crisis. The results for the second largest U.S. bank were strong across most businesses, with consumer banking having its best quarter since 2011 and the wealth management and global banking divisions posting record revenues. "They're showing some positive momentum on growing their customer base and their revenues," said Jonathan Finger of Finger Interests Ltd, a Houston investment firm that owns shares in the bank. "Certainly the stock has been performing very well." Bank of America's shares rose 2.3 percent to $17.15 on Wednesday, after earlier rising to $17.42, the highest level since May 2010. The bank's shares rose 34.6 percent last year, outpacing the broader market, and have risen some 250 percent from their post-crisis nadir in Dece

Northern Irish poet Sinead Morrissey won Britain's prestigious T.S. Eliot prize on Monday for "Parallax", a collection that explores the nature of reality and includes a poem inspired by watching a film while giving birth. Morrissey, who is the first poet laureate of Belfast and had been shortlisted for the prize on three previous occasions, will receive an award of 15,000 pounds ($24,600). "I'm so delighted, it's a dream come true," she told Reuters after the prize was announced at a ceremony held at London's Hertford House, the home of the Wallace Collection of art. Morrissey, whose winning collection examines the difference between perception and reality, said she had no explanation for why Northern Ireland , also the birthplace of late Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, was a fertile breeding ground for poets. "I think there is something distinctive about Northern Ireland and I think the poetry tradition from that very small place with

A napkin-size Renoir painting bought for $7 at a flea market but valued at up to $100,000 must be returned to the museum it was stolen from in 1951, a federal judge ordered on Friday. The 1879 Impressionist painting "Paysage Bords de Seine," dashed off for his mistress by Pierre-Auguste Renoir at a riverside restaurant, has been at the center of a legal tug-of-war between Marcia "Martha" Fuqua, a former physical education teacher from Lovettsville, Virginia, and the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland. Judge Leonie Brinkema, in a hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, dismissed Fuqua's claim of ownership, noting that a property title cannot be transferred if it resulted from a theft. "The museum has put forth an extensive amount of documentary evidence that the painting was stolen," Brinkema said, citing a 1951 police report and museum records. "All the evidence is on the Baltimore museum's side. You sti

U.S. philanthropic foundations have pledged more than $330 million to help preserve the Detroit Institute of Art's collection and assist in shoring up the cash-strapped city's employee pensions, the mediators overseeing Detroit's bankruptcy negotiations said on Monday. _0"> In a statement, the mediators said other foundations are expected to pledge assistance in the near term. "As the mediators attempt to achieve a settlement of all claims, it bears emphasis that the foundations' agreement to participate is specifically conditioned upon all of their funds being committed to the twin goals of helping the city's recovery from bankruptcy by assisting the funding of the retirees' pensions and preserving the DIA's art collection as part of an overall balanced settlement of disputes in the bankruptcy," the mediators said. Last month, auction house Christie's appraised the value of Detroit-owned works at the institute at $454 million to $

Imelda Marcos' former secretary was sentenced on Monday to up to six years in a New York prison for a scheme to sell art that once belonged to the former Philippine first lady, including a Claude Monet water-lily painting that netted $32 million. Vilma Bautista, 75, was convicted in November of conspiracy and tax fraud charges related to the sale or attempted sale of four museum-quality paintings acquired by Marcos during the two decades that her husband, Ferdinand Marcos, was president of the Philippines. The art disappeared around 1986, when Marcos was ousted from power. He died three years later. A New York state judge sentenced Bautista to between two and six years in prison for the count of tax fraud and between one and three years for the conspiracy charge. Bautista, who had faced up to 25 years in prison, was also ordered to pay $3.5 million in restitution to the state of New York. Bautista was charged in the state because she lives in New York City. Prosecutors said

Sotheby's has rebutted claims that an $8.2 million Chinese calligraphic scroll it sold at auction in New York last year is a fake, defending its reputation as it seeks to gain a foothold in the fast-growing China art auction market. The New York-based auctioneer issued a 14-page document authenticating the work by Song dynasty politician-poet Su Shi, China's equivalent of one of Europe's Renaissance masters, which had been expected to fetch in excess of $300,000. The scroll, comprising just nine characters, went well past that estimate, going under the hammer for $8,229,000, including a buyer's premium of 12 to 25 percent. The buyer, Chinese art collector and businessman Liu Yiqian, was quoted by Chinese media on Tuesday as saying he believed the work was real. Sotheby's rejected assertions carried in the state-owned China Cultural Relic News, and written by three Shanghai-based researchers, that the more than 900-year-old scroll was not by Su Shi, also known

A Picasso portrait of his lover and eventual wife Jacqueline Roque and a canvas by Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte are among the star attractions of February auctions that Christie's said on Monday could net almost $380 million. Christie's estimated that those works and others to be sold in four auctions on February 4-5 and a fifth on February 7 in London could raise between 156.7 million and 228.3 million pounds ($260 million-$376 million). The Picasso, entitled "Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil" (Woman in a Turkish costume seated in a chair), 1955, is valued at 15-20 million pounds and is on sale for the first time in 55 years, Christie's said in a press release. The painting is one of a small group of portraits by Pablo Picasso showing Roque in the costume of an "odalisque", a woman of the harem. It is "a colorful, sexually charged celebration of Jacqueline, whom Picasso would marry six years later and who would become one of