More than 500 valuable paintings and works of art have been stolen from a Budapest apartment belonging to a deceased collector, Hungarian police said Saturday, in series of robberies that apparently went undetected for years.

"The police has opened an investigation into a case of theft concerning works of art of exceptional value," a police statement read, adding that it was in the process of determining how much the missing items -- including an untitled sketch by Gustav Klimt -- were worth.

Secret drawings and sketches that a Czech artist produced and kept hidden from his Nazi captors inside a World War II concentration camp went on display at the Jewish Museum in Berlin on Friday.

Bedrich Fritta was 35 years old when he was imprisoned with his wife and baby son at the Theresienstadt Ghetto near Prague, which the Hitler propaganda machine vaunted as a "model camp" by hiding the true fate of Europe's Jews.

Vatican museum director Antonio Paolucci on Friday criticised contemporary-style churches for lacking "form" and harked back to the Baroque era when he said that shrines embodied religious faith.

Award-winning architect Richard Meier's Church of God the Merciful Father in Rome "could just as well be a museum in Texas or an auditorium in Melbourne", he wrote in the Vatican's official Osservatore Romano daily.

France became the 14th country to legalize same-sex marriage Saturday after President Francois Hollande signed the measure into law following months of bitter political debate.

Hollande acted a day after the Constitutional Council threw out a legal challenge by the right-wing opposition, which had been the last obstacle to passing the bill into law. The legislation also legalizes gay adoption.

Brazilian bishops are criticizing a recent decision that gives a de facto green light to same-sex marriage just two months before a visit to the predominantly Catholic country by Pope Francis.

On Tuesday, the National Council of Justice (NCJ), a panel which oversees the South American state's legal system and is headed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, said government offices that issue marriage licenses had no standing to reject gay couples.

Women can not contest Iran's June 14 presidential election, a member of the Islamic state's electoral watchdog said in media reports on Friday, dashing the hopes of some 30 female candidates.

"The law prohibits women from being president," said hardline cleric and former judiciary chief Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, quoted by the Mehr news agency.

Over the past two years, publishers have been steadily filling one of the largest gaps in the e-book catalogue — poetry.

Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes and Wallace Stevens have been among the poets whose work recently became available in electronic format. And Random House Inc., W.W. Norton and several other publishers now routinely release new books in both print and digital versions, including last month's Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, Sharon Olds' "Stag's Leap."

Hope and human resilience are the guiding themes of the new permanent exhibit at Geneva's International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, which will finally re-open its doors this week after a nearly two-year makeover.

"It was important to have the museum be a museum of hope, to show that it is possible to rebuild a new life after living through something very dramatic," director Roger Mayou told Agence France Presse after showing off the revamped exhibition to journalists ahead of the official reopening on May 18.

Moscow metro is set to auction off more than a hundred of its iconic blue carriages after updating its rolling stock, a spokesman told Agence France Presse on Thursday.

The 120 carriages will be sold in lots of three and the state-owned system hopes to raise a total of almost 8 million rubles ($255,221), said metro spokesman Alexei Manakov.

Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum is selling a limited number of copies of the Dutch master's sketchbooks for the first time, providing rare insight into his life and the origin of some of his most famous portraits, the museum said on Thursday.

Only four of Van Gogh's many sketchbooks survive today, three of which form part of a new "Van Gogh at work" exhibition and contain "perhaps some of his most intimate creations," the museum said on its website.