Hundreds of Romanian artists upped pressure on the government Sunday to preserve the independence of a state-funded body that promotes the country's culture at home and abroad.

An online petition is attracting signatures after Prime Minister Victor Ponta's center-left government issued an emergency order Wednesday to shift control of the Romanian Cultural Institute from the presidency to the Senate.

An auction of fine and rare wines fetched $2.2 million in Hong Kong on Saturday, with more than 90 percent of the lots sold, the organizers said.

Christie’s Asia head of wine Charles Curtis said the sale "showed the vigor of the fine wine market in Asia".

A Caravaggio masterpiece, "The Raising of Lazarus," went on show Friday at Rome's Museo di Roma after a meticulous seven-month restoration.

One of the Renaissance master's most important works, it was painted in Sicily soon after he fled from Malta, where he had taken refuge after being sentenced to death for killing a love rival in Rome.

The Warsaw Chamber Opera raises the curtain Friday on the 22nd edition of its celebrated Mozart Festival, which could be its last, given the opera's shaky financial situation, according to officials.

The small opera house in Poland's capital has been in the "globally unique" position of presenting all of Mozart's stage works every summer for the last 21 years, according to director Stefan Sutkowski.

In celebration of Her Majesty the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the British Embassy in Beirut held a reception at Zaitunay Bay, attended by Vice Prime Minister Samir Mokbel representing Lebanese President Michel Sleiman and Prime Minister Najib Mikati, and MP Yassine Jaber representing Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, the British Embassy in Beirut said in a press release.

The reception was also attended by current and former MP’s, Ministers, Arab and foreign Ambassadors, Businessmen, media officials, members of the British Community, NGO representatives and others.

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.