With his open shirt and flowing dark mane, France's most infamous public intellectual has adopted the cause of Libyan freedom, taking an outsized role in French foreign affairs in the process.

Even his detractors -- and he has many -- acknowledge that Bernard-Henri Levy helped engineer France's path breaking recognition of Libya's fledgling rebel authority, a major impetus for the coalition then gathering to back its struggle.

A Mayan statue that sold for the record price of nearly three million Euros ($4.2 million) at a Paris auction this week is a fake, the Mexican government said Tuesday.

"The piece... is a fabrication, because it belongs to none of the pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico," the foreign ministry and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said in a joint statement.

Nearly 222 years after the French Revolution, a desk made by royal cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener is back in the Versailles Palace after being acquired by the French state for 6.75 million Euros ($9.4 million).

French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand on Monday officially turned over to the palace the elegant piece which has been classified as "a work of major cultural value".

Of all the day-to-day hardships suffered by survivors of Japan's tsunami, the simple everyday ritual of a bath -- so important in the nation's culture -- is the thing many say they miss the most.

In a country where bathing is an elaborate and highly prized daily pleasure, the people of the washed-away city of Rikuzentakata now can only rinse their faces in cold water.

"The Art of Painting", one of the most famous works by 17th-century Flemish artist Johannes Vermeer, should remain in Austria, the country's restitution commission recommended on Friday.

The previous owner, Jaromir Czernin, had not been compelled to sell when the painting was bought in 1940 by Adolf Hitler himself for 1.65 million Reichsmark, the commission said in a unanimous decision Friday.

A 5th century BC marble statue caught up in a dispute between Italy and the Paul Getty museum in the United States over stolen art was returned to Italians on Thursday, as they celebrated the country's 150th anniversary.

The Venus of Morgantina was given back to Italy as part of an agreement made in 2007 with California museum, which promised to return 40 items Rome believed had been looted by art thieves.

Excited archeologists in California are rubbing their hands: after three years' back-breaking work they are finally, painstakingly revealing the face of Zed, the ice age mammoth.

Zed is the prize find in a fossil treasure trove unexpectedly unearthed on a Los Angeles building site in 2006, when workmen digging for a new parking lot stumbled on the prehistoric beast's skull.

Experts at a Spanish museum have revealed a previously unknown work by the 17th century Flemish master Anthony van Dyck, a Spanish newspaper said Thursday.

"The Virgin and Child" depicts the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus in her arms watched by Mary Magdalene, King David and the Prodigal Son.

The relics of Saint Therese of Lisieux, a widely-revered 19th-century Roman Catholic nun, made a solemn entry into Jerusalem on Wednesday, the start of a tour of the Holy Land until May 31.

While the relics, fragments of the French saint's femur and foot bones, have been on a world tour for many years their arrival in Tel Aviv on Monday marked their first time in the land she longed to visit in life.

A half-billion-dollar effort to showcase Iraq's holiest Shiite city to the world is coming down to the wire as many contracts remain unsigned and funds are being hastily re-allocated.

Preparations for Najaf to become the Arab world's Islamic Capital of Culture next year are underway, but officials involved in its planning admit that time is short and much remains to be done.