Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor and the first elected president of the European parliament, on Thursday joined the Academie Francaise, the elite intellectual guardians of the French language. The 82-year-old Veil, a former French minister who ranks among the country's most respected politicians, was only the sixth woman to join the "immortals", as the 40 members of the Academie ...

PARIS (Reuters) - French feminist Simone Veil, who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and went on to become one of France's most popular politicians, joined the elite Academie Francaise Thursday. The Academie, a kind of linguistic supreme court that rules on issues such as finding French words for "computer" or "Internet," has only admitted six women including Veil since it ...

A Polish court convicted three men Thursday of the theft of the notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets You Free) sign from the Auschwitz memorial site in December. The men, two of whom are brothers, were given prison sentences ranging from 18 months to 2 1/2 years. In ...