The bodies of over 400 troops buried in a mass grave in Northern France will get the heroe’s burial they deserve.

Twelve men from the Cameron Highlanders, with 15 soldiers with Scottish connections, are among the 400 Australian and British troops exhumed from their World War I resting place in a five-month operation, which ended in September.

They will now, in February, be given an individual service and burial with full military honours in marked, but unnamed graves, in a new £1.5million cemetery.

A memorial to the fallen heroes will be unveiled on July 19, the 94th anniversary of the Battle of Fromelles, in which more than 7,000 British and Australian troops were killed, wounded or taken prisoner in a disastrous 24 hours.

The bodies of the fallen were taken by the Germans to sites behind their lines and buried in pits. These were discovered in the 1920s during official post-war burial campaigns, leading to their re-interment by the then Imperial War Graves Commission.

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Check out this awesome collection of blueprints and photographs showing the construction of the Eiffel Tower.

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The New York Times has an interesting piece about how Egypt’s requests for the return of artifacts is motivated by politics as much as it is by culture.

Mr. Hawass also recently fired a shot at France, demanding the Louvre return five fresco fragments it purchased in 2000 and 2003 from a gallery and at auction. They belonged to a 3,200-year-old tomb near Luxor and had been in storage at the museum. Egypt had made the demand before, but this time suspended the Louvre’s long-term excavation at Saqqara, near Cairo, and said it would stop collaborating on Louvre exhibitions.

France got the message. It promised to send the fragments back tout de suite.

It didn’t go unnoticed in Paris, Berlin or Cairo that Mr. Hawass pressed his case about Nefertiti and suspended the excavations by the Louvre just after his country’s culture minister, Farouk Hosny, bitterly lost a bid to become director general of the United Nations’ cultural agency, Unesco. The post went late last month to a Bulgarian diplomat instead. Mr. Hosny would have been the first Arab to land the job, and Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, had banked a not insignificant amount of his own prestige on the minister’s getting it.

The chair that Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have sat on before his army was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo is set to hit the auction block.

The diminutive French dictator is said to have rested on the unremarkable, small wooden seat in 1815 at Courcelles in Belgium, 22 miles from the battlefield.

He stayed at the home of a family and the daughter of the owner, Pauline Cambier, kept the chair carefully, aware of who had perched upon it.

It comes with two letters of provenance, one from a friend of Cambier, stating how she had often told him about its history.

The Louvre museum in Paris, France, will return five Egyptian frescoes that were stolen from a tomb in the 1980s.

The announcement comes two days after the head of antiquities in Cairo said he would cease all co-operation with the museum until they were sent back.

The Egyptians say the Louvre bought the Pharaonic steles in 2000 even though it knew they had been stolen in the 1980s.

They are believed to be from a 3,200-year-old tomb of the cleric, Tetaki, in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor.

The steles, which are each only 15cm (5.9in) wide and 30cm (11.8in) high, are currently part of the Louvre’s reserve collection.