An Indian artist said on Monday he had been beaten up at his gallery by five men over nude paintings of actresses and models that the attackers claimed were an insult to the country.

Pranava Prakash was assaulted by the gang who burst into the gallery in Noida on the outskirts of New Delhi, where he is exhibiting nudes of top Bollywood star Vidya Balan and other public figures.

The Syrian authorities have agreed to an offer by Russia to have informal talks in Moscow with opposition representatives to resolve the crisis in the country, the Russian foreign ministry said Monday, an offer swiftly rejected by the opposition.

Russia had suggested to both the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the opposition that they should meet in Moscow for "informal contacts" without any preconditions, the foreign ministry said.

An Oslo court on Monday found two men guilty of plotting "a terrorist act" for a planned attack on the Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

Norwegian national Mikael Davud, a member of China's Uighur minority considered the mastermind behind the plot against the Jyllands-Posten daily, was sentenced to seven years behind bars, while Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak, an Iraqi Kurd residing in Norway, received a three-and-a-half-year prison term.

Japan's population is expected to shrink to a third of its current size over the next century, with the average woman living to over 90 within 50 years, a government report said Monday.

The population is forecast to decline from the current 127.7 million to 86.7 million by 2060 and to tumble again to 42.9 million by 2110 "if conditions remain unchanged", the health and welfare ministry said in the report.

The arid plains fringing Australia's desert center are more suited to camels than blooms of coral but there, hundreds of miles from the coast, a piece of the Great Barrier Reef has been put on ice.

Suspended in a liquid nitrogen chamber of minus-196 degrees Celsius (-320 Fahrenheit), the 70 billion sperm and 22 billion coral embryos are part of an ambitious Australian-first project to preserve and perhaps one day regenerate the world-famous reef.

Japanese film and camera maker Fujifilm has offered scandal-hit Olympus a capital and business tie-up, it said Monday as it announced a slump in third-quarter profits.

Fujifilm said it has formally proposed a link-up to Olympus' advisors, seeing synergies in the pair's medical operations, although it did not reveal details.

Already dismissed as a "waste of time" and "harmful" by two foreign ministers, the "fiscal compact" that EU leaders hope to conclude at a summit Monday has run into criticism before even being agreed.

The German-led accord, designed as a tighter set of budgetary rules to beef up the ailing and much-infringed Stability and Growth Pact, was set to be agreed by 26 EU leaders later Monday, with Britain remaining on the sidelines.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe is to head to New York on Tuesday to press the U.N. Security Council into taking action over the Syrian regime's "crimes against humanity", his ministry said.

Juppe will seek "to persuade the Security Council to assume its responsibilities faced with the Syrian regime's worsening crimes against humanity," ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said on Monday.

December: The three main credit ratings agencies, Fitch, Standard & Poor's and Moody's, downgrade Greece's debt. Prime Minister George Papandreou outlines massive public spending cuts.

-- 2010 --

A suicide bomber killed an Islamist militant commander in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar on Monday, along with at least three other people, police said.

The attack damaged a house that the target, Haji Akhunzada, was building in Pakha Ghulam on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan's main northwestern city that runs into a militant-heavy region on the Afghan border.