The liberation of the Nazi concentration and death camps came as World War II drew to a close, as allied forces advanced on Berlin -- the Soviet Red Army from the east and the Americans and other allies from the west.

There is, however, a distinction between the actual "liberation" of the camps and the "evacuations", a complex process under which in the last year of World War II the Nazis transferred prisoners from camp to camp in what is know as the "death marches" in a bid to cover up their atrocities.

Danuta Roman is channeling her inner Vincent van Gogh. She applies short brushstrokes of azure, turquoise and Payne's grey to mimic water reflections on an oil painting by the Dutch master.

"I'm trying to figure out how he created this landscape," says the 42-year-old painter as she studies an 1887 canvas with the Seine river and a scene outside Paris.

An Egyptian conservation group said Friday it will sue the antiquities minister over a "botched" repair of the mask of King Tutankhamun that left a crust of dried glue on the priceless relic.

The golden funerary mask, seen Friday by AFP at the Egyptian Museum, showed the sticky aftermath of what appears to have been overzealous use of glue to fix the mask's beard in place.

Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau -- the infamous Nazi camp which has come to symbolize the Shoah -- Poles still bristle at the erroneous phrase "Polish death camps" when people talk about the wartime genocide of European Jews.

Six million Polish citizens, half of whom were Jewish, perished under German occupation during World War II.

Libby Lane becomes the Church of England's first female bishop on Monday despite entrenched opposition from traditionalists, who say that the clergy's top rung is no place for a woman.

Lane, 48, will go from being a regular parish priest to taking on one of the trickiest jobs in the Church of England since King Henry VIII founded it in 1534.

It was a hyena that killed the boy, but four elderly women got the blame. Villagers slashed them with machetes then set fire to their bodies for casting spells on the wild animal.

"They cut her with machetes," said Sufia Shadrack, the daughter of one of the murdered women in her small village in Tanzania's northern Mwanza district. "Then they took firewood, mattresses, an iron sheet and burned her like you would cook fish or meat."

A New York woman who has been fighting for years over ownership of two Renaissance masterpieces seized by the Nazis during World War II won a legal round this week when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant a hearing on a California museum's effort to keep her lawsuit from proceeding to trial.

At the center of the fight is "Adam and Eve," a pair of life-sized oil paintings by German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder. They have hung in Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum for more than 30 years and were appraised at $24 million in 2006.

Intrepid boy hero Tintin stars at one of Europe's top art fairs next week when the original cover of his 1942 "Shooting Star" adventures goes on sale for 2.5 million euros.

The yellowing sketch by Belgian creator Herge shows Tintin and his faithful dog Snowy on a barren rocky beach looking in astonishment at a huge mushroom.

It wasn't until the 2010 earthquake devastated Haiti's capital that many people even realized that dozens of the city's grandest old buildings were still standing — its quirky and ornate "gingerbread houses" with their fancy latticework, turrets and spires.

Amid the destruction, some Haitians realized time was running out to save the architectural gems, often hidden behind concrete walls, that had been steadily vanishing to bulldozers and cheap renovations as Port-au-Prince became a sprawling and overcrowded city.

The blue and gold braided beard on the burial mask of famed pharaoh Tutankhamun was hastily glued back on with epoxy, damaging the relic after it was knocked during cleaning, conservators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo said Wednesday.

The museum is one of the city's main tourist sites, but in some areas, ancient wooden sarcophagi lay unprotected from the public, while pharaonic burial shrouds, mounted on walls, crumble from behind open panels of glass. Tutankhamun's mask, over 3,300 years old, and other contents of his tomb are its top exhibits.