Roger Garaudy, a French communist intellectual who denied that the Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews during World War II, has died aged 98, officials said Friday.

Garaudy was fined 120,000 francs (18,000 dollars) by a Paris court in 1998 for his anti-Zionist work "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics" which was found to have distorted the wartime deaths of an estimated six million Jews.

Neanderthals may have been cave-painting artists, according to research published Thursday that details a new method of analyzing cave paintings in Spain and shows they are the oldest known to man.

The tests on 50 paintings in 11 caves in northern Spain, described in the U.S. journal Science, hint at a previously unknown talent that may have been held by Neanderthals in Europe more than 40,000 years ago.

The Palestinians plan to go ahead with their bid to put one of Christianity's holiest sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List despite a negative report by experts, their envoy to the body said Thursday.

Ambassador Elias Sanbar said the report on the Church of the Nativity was "biased" and "politicized" and was influenced by the United States and Israel, which sought to block the Palestinians from joining UNESCO last October.

France on Thursday granted one of its top honors, membership in the prestigious Academie Francaise, to Franco-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, whose books seek to build bridges between East and West.

Maalouf became the first Lebanese inducted as an one of the academy's "immortals" -- the 40 lifelong members tasked as guardians of the French language.

A collection of thousands of letters, papers and photos relating to Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi will go on auction in Britain next month, auction house Sotheby's said Wednesday.

The archive belonged to Gandhi's close friend Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jewish bodybuilder and architect, who became his constant companion after they met in Johannesburg in 1904.

British author Jon McGregor on Wednesday won the 100,000-euro ($125,000) International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, one of the world's most lucrative honors for a work of fiction.

McGregor scooped the award for his novel "Even the Dogs" about the lives of a group of homeless drug addicts.

Renowned Lebanese Author Amin Maalouf will join the prestigious French Academy institution (Academie Francaise) on Thursday after being elected in June 2011 as the successor of Claude Levi-Strauss, news reports said Thursday.

“It is a great joy for me, but the ceremony of my joining the academy is more majestic than any other,” Maalouf told the Agence France Presse in an interview.

For the first time in its history, the French capital's iconic Louvre Museum opened up its storied arcades Tuesday to fashion: a catwalk show by Italian house Salvatore Ferragamo.

Proof enough of the unique setting of this collection lay with the celebrity-filled front row — from actresses Freida Pinto and Leighton Meester to Oscar-winner Hilary Swank.

It is one of the biggest relics left behind by the Nazis, perched on one of Germany's most spectacular beaches, and after years of neglect it is getting a new lease of life.

The historic dormitory complex at Prora, built between 1936 and 1939, sprawls nearly five kilometers (three miles) along a choice slab of Baltic Sea coastline.

Almost 200 years after Prussian and English troops defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, Belgian archeologists have unearthed the complete remains of a young soldier in what they dubbed a rare find.

"You can almost see him dying," Belgian archeologist Dominique Bosquet said of the skeleton, lying on its back with the spherical musket bullet that felled the soldier still between his ribs.