A rare 3,400-year-old Egyptian burial shroud fetched 374,000 euros ($426,000) at auction in Paris Thursday, on the latest leg of a journey that has seen it passed from a billionaire banking heir to his wife and, later, his mistress.

The sale at Piasa auction house was unusual as most similar shrouds -- 22 others are known to exist in the world -- are in the collections of museums like the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Pierre Geagea is a deaf-born contemporary expressionist dancer.

At a young age, Pierre Geagea finds in sign language and dance two essential modes of expression. Sign language is his bridge between the spoken word and the gesture. Later, he slowly discovers sound and begins to enter rhythm and music into dialogue with words and signs. Pierre’s unique relation to these elements is his mother tongue.

The bill to repair Britain's crumbling Houses of Parliament could hit £7.1 billion unless lawmakers move out for up to six years, according to a study published Thursday.

The independent report, commissioned by parliamentary authorities in 2013, found that the famed neo-Gothic building posed major fire risks and was threatened with roof collapses.

The U.S. wine market, already the world's biggest, still has "phenomenal" potential for growth if handled with care, U.S. wine professionals said this week at the world's leading wine fair, Vinexpo.

"We are a young thirsty nation," one expert said, referring to the 370 million cases of wine guzzled in 2014 -- 25 percent of them imported -- as well as the steady growth in wine consumption in the last two decades, which is expected to see an 11 percent hike between 2014 and 2018.

The halls of Art Basel, the world's largest contemporary art fair, brim with elegantly dressed collectors all searching for something special -- and, increasingly, financial investors just after a good deal.

The event opens to the public on Thursday, but special VIPs got an advance peek at the vast array of artworks by 20th century masters like Picasso, Calder and Warhol, mixed in with today's cutting edge creations, on Tuesday.

China has banned civil servants, students and teachers in its mainly Muslim Xinjiang region from fasting during Ramadan and ordered restaurants to stay open, official websites showed as the holy month began on Thursday.

Most Muslims are required to fast from dawn to dusk during the month but China's ruling Communist party is officially atheist and for years has restricted the practice in Xinjiang, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur minority.

World-renowned Indian architect Charles Correa has died at the age of 84 after a short illness, an industry group said Wednesday.

Correa, who designed a number of landmark buildings in India including a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, died in hospital in the western Indian city of Mumbai late on Tuesday.

After decades of quietly selling fruit and vegetables, a family-run Turkish grocery shop has become the unlikely flashpoint in a Berlin culture war pitting a neighborhood against property developers.

No-one is more surprised than its owner, Ahmet Caliskan, 55, who received an eviction notice in March but has since been heartened by an outpouring of support from the people of his colorful, bohemian district of Kreuzberg.

South Korean rights activists on Wednesday celebrated a court's decision to overturn a ban on a gay pride parade in Seoul, but conservative Christians denounced the ruling as encouraging "evil" behavior.

Police had cited public safety concerns and traffic disruption as the reasons behind the ban imposed last month, but the Seoul Administrative Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of the parade. 

A Chinese university has earned comparisons with Harry Potter's Hogwarts due to its bizarre castle campus, but local traditions supplied the magic at a Confucian-style ceremony for its degree graduates.

The gigantic grey towers, stone walls and turrets of the Hebei Academy of Fine Arts' castle complex dominate surrounding wheat fields near Xinle city in northern China.