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.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday that Kurdish would be taught in public schools, "a historic step" for Turkey.

"Our pupils ... will now be able to learn Kurdish as optional courses if there is a sufficient number (of students)," Erdogan told his ruling party members in the parliament.

Madrid's Thyssen Museum opens Tuesday an exhibition of works by Edward Hopper, one of the largest retrospectives of works by the iconic U.S. artist ever to be shown in Europe.

The "Hopper" show features 73 paintings, drawings, prints and watercolors by the 20th-century realist dubbed the painter of American loneliness and isolation.

France's Louvre museum stepped in Monday and snapped up a historic sculpture for its collection after it was auctioned off for 3.75 million euros ($4.68 million).

A private collector had successfully bid, via telephone, or the marble bust by 18th century sculptor Edme Bouchardon at Drouot's auction house in Paris, when the museum exercised its prerogative to claim the work for the state.

On a heavily trafficked street where few tourists pass in the heart of ancient Rome lies the entrance to one of the Eternal City's most extraordinary and overlooked monuments -- Trajan's Market.

Built in the second century AD as a series of vaulted offices for managers of the nearby Trajan Forum headed up by a "procurator", the architectural complex has served as a fortress, a convent and a barracks over the centuries.