More than 3,700 photos of American pop icon Marilyn Monroe will be sold this weekend along with their copyrights, a Los Angeles auction house said Thursday.

The photos -- plus negatives, slides and copyrights -- are part of a collection of more than 75,000 images taken by fashion photographer Milton Greene in the 1950s and 1960s.

Archaeologists said Wednesday they have found a flint blade dating back 1.4 million years in the caves of Atapuerca in Spain, the earliest sign of a human presence at the site.

The three-centimeter (1.2-inch) blade was found in the so-called Elephant Chasm cave where in 2007 researchers found a human finger and jawbone dating back 1.2 million years -- considered the remains of the "oldest European" ever found.

The headlines out of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which tend to evoke images of bloodshed, rape, ethnic hatred and government corruption, are usually no laughing matter.

But political cartoonist Kashoun Thembo is an expert at wringing humor out of his country's tragedies, capturing the newsmakers and travails of life in DR Congo with a fierce pen that hits home and spares no one.

Two rare books that once belonged to the Swedish royal family and were stolen from the country's National Library are to be handed back here on Wednesday.

New York District Attorney Preet Bharara will present the two books, one of which is 330 years old, over to the library's CEO Gunilla Herdenberg in a ceremony in Manhattan, officials said.

Hundreds of thousands of young Catholics packed the beach of Copacabana Tuesday for the start of a weeklong religious event in Rio de Janeiro that includes gatherings with Pope Francis.

Rain clouds cleared in time and pilgrims from around the world waved flags, sang and prayed as the archbishop of Rio, Orani Tempesta, led a mass to kick off World Youth Day in the country with the world's greatest number of Roman Catholics.

The majority-Catholic Philippines told Muslim teachers Tuesday to remove their veils inside classrooms, in part to promote better relationships between teachers and pupils.

Education Secretary Armin Luistro said the move was part of reforms to make schools more sensitive to religion.

Bodvalenke may be desperately poor, but some colorful murals depicting folk tales and figures from Roma legends are generating hope, inspiration and tourist money for the small Hungarian village.

"The concept is simple. Roma artists from Hungary and beyond come here to paint wonderful frescoes on houses," said Eszter Pasztor, a non-Roma translator and interpreter from Budapest who launched the project in 2009.

With trowels and paintbrushes, dozens of archaeologists in white hard-hats patiently sift the reddish-brown earth in the caves of Atapuerca, searching for remains a million years old.

From under strata spanning hundreds of millenia at this site in northern Spain, they unearth ancient mouse bones and the teeth of horses -- but what they most hope for is a sign of prehistoric humans that could write a new chapter in our evolution.

The publisher that bought the German rights to a novel for a song before learning that the author was Harry Potter writer J.K. Rowling said Sunday it was eyeing a windfall.

Munich-based Blanvalet Verlag snapped up the rights in February to "The Cuckoo's Calling", a purported debut novel by a certain Robert Galbraith about a private detective who investigates a model's suicide, its editor Anja Franzen told news weekly Focus.

Sixty years ago, as the Iron Curtain sealed off Eastern Europe, Teodor Stanca was among millions sentenced to jail, death or forced labor for opposing Communist rule.

Today, as survivors of this dark page of history are getting older and fewer, 80-year-old Stanca says he hopes a Romanian jail-turned-museum will remind future generations that "freedom needs eternal vigilance".