Sideshow: Swift's note of forgiveness

Taylor Swift has absolved Kanye West of last year's onstage sin with one somber song.

The 20-year-old delivered a poignant and powerful ode about West at Sunday night's MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles that instead of criticizing him, sympathized with his difficult time in the spotlight.

"Thirty-two and still growing up now; who you are is not what you did," she sang softly, adding: "You're still an innocent."

Swift's dramatic performance delivered on the hype promised from a sequel to last year's incident in which West marred Swift's acceptance speech for best female video by jumping onstage and insisting the award should have gone to Beyoncé.

On a weekend that Hollywood was largely content to cede to football and barbecues, Sony-Screen Gems' Resident Evil: Afterlife 3-D led the box office.

According to studio estimates, the horror film earned $27.7 million over the weekend, exceeding expectations. It's the fourth Resident Evil film, all starring Milla Jovovich. This installment opened better than the others.

Resident Evil was the only film in new release on the historically slow moviegoing weekend following Labor Day. Takers, in its third week, came in second with $6.1 million. Last weekend's top film, the George Clooney thriller The American, took in $5.9 million.

The British Museum in London says it is getting 25 million pounds ($38 million) from John Sainsbury, the former chairman of Britain's Sainsbury's supermarket chain. One of the largest gifts to the arts in recent decades, the donation will help the world-renowned institution in a time of uncertainty for British cultural institutions, which face deep public funding cuts. The British Museum's collection includes the Rosetta Stone, the Lewis chessmen, and the Elgin Marbles.

A Los Angeles gallery is taking head-on the dispute over garage-sale pictures that the owner says are the early work of Ansel Adams. The Duncan Miller Gallery is putting up 20 authentic prints by the renowned nature photographer in a brief show. Next to those will be prints from the collection of Rick Norsigian of Fresno, who said he bought the glass negatives for $45 at a garage sale, then had them authenticated as the lost work of Adams. Adams' representatives dispute that Norsigian's trove is the work of the photographer, who died in 1984. Next to the garage-sale find, the gallery will hang the work of photo-hobbyist Earl Brooks, who Adams' family says is the real photographer behind Norsigian's images.