French President Francois Hollande on Friday stepped 36,000 years back in time into a darkened, cool cave to admire the earliest known figurative paintings of hands, bears, rhinos and panthers.

But he was actually above ground, inaugurating a giant, millimetre-by-millimetre exact replica of the closely guarded Grotte Chauvet in southern France, unearthed by chance in 1994 by a group of speleologists who discovered hundreds of paintings by our prehistoric ancestors.

Masked men toppled three statues of Communist leaders overnight Friday Ukraine's city of Kharkiv, days after parliament moved to purge Soviet-era symbols countrywide.

A video posted on YouTube by an anti-Russian militant group called "We've had enough" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Q7a_IXX40 -- shows the men smashing three large monuments glorifying Bolshevik leaders in Ukraine's second largest city.

Three months after appointing an openly gay diplomat as France's ambassador to the Vatican, Paris is still waiting for the green light from Rome.

Such a delay is unusual. Normally, the Vatican takes less than a month and a half before deciding whether to accept an ambassador. 

Gaza police have seized a work by famed street artist Banksy from a man who bought it for $200 from a family that later said it was duped, both sides told AFP.

Bilal Khaled, accused of buying the work painted on a door belonging to the Darduna family without telling them its real value, said Friday "the police seized it yesterday under a court order."

Loukas Sehremelis was just 12 years old when Nazi troops burst into his house in the Greek village of Distomo, shooting and killing indiscriminately.

"A burly German soldier launched himself through the window and fired a shot in the air from his pistol," said Sehremelis, now 83, sitting in the tiny living room where his family was massacred on June 10, 1944.

One hundred years ago, African-Americans began a mass exodus from the rural South, heading north in search of economic opportunity and social equality. The Museum of Modern Art is paying tribute to that movement in a rare exhibition of a series chronicling the phenomenon from artist Jacob Lawrence, himself the son of migrants.

His Great Migration series, featuring 60 poignant narrative paintings, is the centerpiece of the exhibition that runs through Sept. 7.

A play about American activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, is winning quiet acceptance in New York, where uproar postponed its debut a decade ago.

Her parents and the play's director say the dimming controversy reflects a shift in American attitudes towards Israel and the Palestinian conflict.

A pair of previously unknown sketches by Paul Cezanne will be displayed in Philadelphia following their recent discovery on the backs of two watercolors.

They'll be on view at the Barnes Foundation in double-sided frames, with both sides visible, from Friday through May 18. One sketch is in graphite, the other in watercolor.

As preparations were made to remove the statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town Thursday, white groups launched protests to protect what they see as their heritage.

South Africa's oldest university voted Wednesday to remove the monument from its campus after a month of student protests against a perceived symbol of historical white oppression.

The U.N. gave a third of the world's countries a passing grade Thursday for efforts to provide universal basic education, but said most governments had failed on a pledge made 15 years ago.

In 2000, 164 countries agreed at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) World Education Forum to ensure basic education for all by 2015.