A wooden beam embedded at the bottom of northern Lake Michigan appears to have been there for centuries, underwater archaeologists announced Tuesday, a crucial finding as crews dig toward what they hope is the carcass of a French ship that disappeared in the 17th Century.

Expedition leaders still weren't ready to declare they had found a shipwreck or the long-lost Griffin. The ship, commanded by the French explorer La Salle, was never seen again after setting sail in September 1679 from an island near the entrance of Green Bay, in what is now northern Wisconsin, with a crew of a six and a cargo of furs.

A vast wasteland close to St Basil's Cathedral and Red Square that once housed a giant Soviet hotel is set to become a landscaped park, Moscow officials said Tuesday as they revealed details of a 10 billion-ruble ($312 million) regeneration plan.

Hidden behind hoardings, the desolate expanse of bushes, tangled metal and concrete beside the Moscow River housed the Khrushchev-era Rossiya hotel, once Europe's largest. It was demolished six years ago but ambitious redevelopment plans under former Mayor Yury Luzhkov came to nothing.

“What? About you", a solo exhibition by the young Romanian painter Alina Teodorescu (1982) for the first time in the Middle East will kick off on June 28, a press release said.

The bold figurative works by Alina, who lives and works in London, are an expose of her daily diary,

Airborne laser technology has uncovered a network of roadways and canals, illustrating a bustling ancient city linking Cambodia's famed Angkor Wat temples complex.

The discovery was announced late Monday in a peer-reviewed paper released early by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The laser scanning revealed a previously undocumented formal urban planned landscape integrating the 1,200-year-old temples.

Che Guevara's personal letters and a slew of unpublished photographs were published by a Bolivian newspaper Monday, nearly half a century after the Argentine-born Cuban revolution hero's death.

La Razon ran a 20-page supplement on the items that the military had secretly kept under lock since 1967.

As elder trees add to the beauty of Romania's landscapes, their white flowers help its rural economy grow when they are turned into cordials exported to Britain and Japan.

Every year Romanians anxiously await the blossom season in May and June to pick the delicately scented flowers and concoct a traditional soft drink called "socata".

Iran's ancient citadel of Bam, almost completely destroyed by a major earthquake in 2003, has been removed from the UNESCO list of "World Heritage in Danger", a spokesman said Tuesday.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization committee, which began its annual session in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh on Sunday, said there had been improvements in the site's management and conservation.

Six ancient Syrian sites as well as Australia's Great Barrier Reef could be listed as endangered by UNESCO, which Sunday begins its annual session to decide which global cultural and natural treasures merit World Heritage status.

The main task of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation committee will be to decide whether 31 sites, including Japan's Mount Fuji and the city of Agadez in Niger, are of "outstanding universal value".

The Chinese state news agency Xinhua on Friday opened a gallery in Paris, the first of a number planned for major world cities, with an inaugural photographic exhibition tracing 50 years of Sino-French relations.

The gallery will host photographic and art exhibitions and similar venues are planned in other cities such as New York, London, Madrid and Hong Kong.

Parts of the plane in which former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt's pilot son Quentin was shot down in July 1918 will be auctioned off on June 29 in this northwest French town, organizers said Friday.

The fragments of cabin were handed down to the descendants of Quentin Roosevelt's former landlady in Issoudun, central France where the young pilot was based.