When Simon McBurney fled Thatcherite Britain in the 1980s he found a spiritual home in Paris. Back in France as guest artist at the Avignon festival, the actor-director opened the event with a bang.

McBurney's version of Mikhail Bulgakov's Soviet satire "The Master and Margarita" opened the three-week extravaganza on Saturday night, before 2,000 people in the court of honor of the southeastern city's historic Papal Palace.

Workers have occupied the famous Cinecitta film studios in Rome where classics like "Quo Vadis" and "Cleopatra" were shot in a protest against a major renovation project, trade unionists said on Monday.

"Dozens of workers and artisans will be forced to leave," Alberto Manzini, a regional official from Italy's biggest trade union, CGIL, told Agence France Presse.

South Sudan has put aside dire warnings over the stability and economic viability of the fledgling nation, the world's newest, to celebrate its first year of independence.

Crowds took to the streets of the capital Juba on Monday, with people crammed into cars driving around the city and honking horns to mark the first anniversary since separating from former civil war foes Sudan.

The Indian government has stepped in to buy a collection of thousands of letters, papers and photos relating to Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi ahead of its planned auction in London.

The archive, which belonged to Gandhi's close friend Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jewish bodybuilder and architect, was to have gone under the hammer at Sotheby's on Tuesday.

Russian-born author Olga Martynova was awarded Sunday the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann prize for literature, a major German-language award, the jury announced.

The 50-year-old Martynova, who is now based in Germany, was selected for the 25,000-euro ($30,000) prize for her story about a young boy entitled "Ich werde sagen: 'Hi!'" ("I will say: Hi!").

France and Germany marked 50 years of reconciliation, their leaders stressing the ties that unite the two countries and condemning news of the desecration of dozens of German war graves.

The vandalism of more than 40 graves of German soldiers killed during World War I came on the eve of the highly symbolic meeting in Reims in northern France, a region scarred by centuries of war with Germany.

Pakistani police seized a large number of ancient Buddhist sculptures that smugglers were attempting to spirit out of the country and sell for millions of dollars on the international antiquities market, officials say.

The stash included many sculptures of Buddha and other related religious figures that experts say could be over 2,000 years old. The items were likely illegally excavated from archaeological sites in Pakistan's northwest, said Salimul Haq, a director at the government's archaeology department.

Surrounded by walls of boxes, researchers scan and catalogue the crumbling, mildewed pages, some nibbled by rats, which make up the national archives of the one-year-old republic of South Sudan.

During the five decades of civil war, an extreme climate and an assortment of animals have eaten away at the archives, some of which are still piled up in a giant city center tent -- unbearably hot and humid even in early morning.

It was once one of the most prestigious places to live in the whole Soviet Union, with good salaries, an idyllic waterfront and away from the prying eyes of the secret services.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Akademgorodok -- a highbrow town outside Siberia's main city of Novosibirsk, created in the 1950s for academics to live and work -- fell on hard times.

Italian art experts have reportedly discovered around 100 drawings and a number of paintings by the Renaissance master Caravaggio in a find that could be worth over $860 million.

Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz and Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli found the works among a collection held at Milan's Sforza Castle by pupils of painter Simone Peterzano with whom Caravaggio studied from the age of 11.