NBA all-time scoring leader Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a legendary retired center, was named a global cultural ambassador on Wednesday by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Abdul-Jabbar, born Lew Alcindor before changing his name after leading Milwaukee to the 1971 NBA title, scored 38,387 points in 1,560 games over a 20-year NBA career and was named the NBA Most Valuable Player in 1971 and 1985.

Twenty years after the USSR collapsed, Georgia's fervently pro-Western government regards the Soviet Union as a repressive dictatorship and has been trying to erase its legacy.

But perhaps inconveniently for the administration of President Mikheil Saakashvili, the USSR's most notorious leader Joseph Stalin was born as Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in the provincial Georgian town of Gori.

Britain's greatest living artist, David Hockney, has swapped the Californian sunshine for the landscape of his native Yorkshire for a blockbuster exhibition which goes on show this week.

Hockney has portrayed country lanes and hedgerows in a riot of color that leaps off the wall at the Royal Academy of Arts, a short walk from Piccadilly Circus in London.

Historians have cheered news that Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" will be reprinted in Germany for the first time since the Nazi dictator's fall in 1945, just as Holocaust survivors hit out at the move.

British publisher Peter McGee said he would put out excerpts from the anti-Semitic manifesto, which laid out the Fuehrer's vision long before he took power in 1933, alongside commentary putting the work in historical context.

Available for rent: The Acropolis.

In a move bound to leave many Greeks and scholars aghast, Greece's culture ministry said Tuesday it will open up some of the debt-stricken country's most-cherished archaeological sites to advertising firms and other ventures.

British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.

Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said Tuesday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, drafty British Geological Survey.

The Auschwitz Museum on Monday filed a criminal complaint with Polish prosecutors on the heels of media reports that rare documents on the former Nazi German death camp were smuggled out of Poland.

"We've notified prosecutors (...) and the Institute of National Remembrance about the possibility of a crime having been committed after having heard media reports" alleging rare archives had been smuggled, Auschwitz Museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki told Agence France Presse.

Geneva once condemned Jean-Jacques Rousseau and burned his books, but is now preparing to celebrate his birth 300 years ago with pomp.

The Swiss city has declared him one of its greatest citizens and a key figure of the Enlightenment.

The Soviet secret police and its Russian successor actively blocked a probe into the fate of Swedish Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg and Sweden was informed, researchers say, citing a recently unearthed document.

The Swedish diplomat hailed for rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II, went missing after his arrest by Soviet forces in Hungary on January 17, 1945.

A black maternity dress accentuates the football-size bulge in Cassandra Cheong's abdomen, proudly proclaiming her status as an imminent mother of a "dragon baby".

Cheong, 26, has been carrying her daughter for 38 weeks and is due to give birth after January 23, the start of the Year of the Dragon which comes every 12 years in the Chinese almanac and traditionally triggers a baby boom in Asia.