Exhibit has new Dylan sketches

LONDON » Portraits by Bob Dylan are going on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

The 72-year-old singer-songwriter has been exhibiting his artworks for six years, but these 12 new pastel sketches have not been shown before.

The display is a departure for the gallery, which showcases portraits of prominent Britons. The gallery says Dylan’s images are "an amalgamation of features the musician has collected from life, memory and his imagination and fashioned into people, some real and some fictitious."

"Bob Dylan: Face Value" runs Aug. 24 to Jan. 5.

Zeppelin tours French countryside

PARIS » Tourists seeking an original way to take in France’s famed countryside have a new way to do it: in a helium-filled zeppelin.

Airship Paris’ 250-foot-long, five-story airship began flights this month over the forests and villages northwest of Paris. The company says it has received "lots" of reservations for flights. It says it is the first commercial airship in the region in 30 years.

The zeppelin has room for 12 passengers, who can move about the large-windowed cabin, viewing sites such as the Seine river and the Chateau de Versailles from 1,000 feet up. On clear days the Eiffel Tower is visible in the distance.

A half-hour flight is about $300.

Old prison might become museum

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. » New Mexico might open a museum at the site of a bloody 1980 prison riot.

State Corrections Secretary Gregg Marcantel says strong public interest in tours of the closed "Old Main" prison offered during last year’s New Mexico centennial celebration sparked the idea for a permanent museum.

Old Main was closed in 1988, eight years after the February 1980 riot in which inmates killed 33 fellow prisoners in a violent clash that included beheadings, amputations and burned bodies.

Officials say the museum south of Santa Fe could include tours, a restaurant and an inmate-staffed hobby shop.

The planned museum follows a trend in "dark tourism" to transform tragic sites into tourist attractions.