From culture-jamming youths wired into a networked world, to neo-dandies or take-it-slow types, what tomorrow's man will look like -- and what he might want to buy -- is a capital issue for big brands.

Back in 1994 the term "metrosexual", short for "metropolitan heterosexual", was coined to describe an emerging breed of male: urban, single, sophisticated and ready to spend what it takes to look good.

Dark, bare photos of modern Chinese society by Liu Xia, detained wife of China's best known dissident, went on show in New York without her knowledge after they were spirited out of her country.

The photos were brought out of China under the noses of the authorities by French academic, writer and economist Guy Sorman, a friend of the artist and her Nobel Peace prize-winning husbandLiu Xiaobo.

The Chateau de Versailles, the backdrop to "Farewell My Queen" which opened the Berlin film festival Thursday, has long welcomed filmmakers into its grounds, provided they behave themselves.

Sofia Coppola's "Marie-Antoinette" in 2005, with its candy-colored take on courtly life, followed the next year by "Da Vinci Code", have rekindled industry interest in France's rich web of historic settings, chief among them Versailles, which has hosted some 1,000 film, television and documentary shoots since 1940.

The beat is infectious U.S.-style hip hop but the rhymes come straight from the streets of Monrovia, a city which for years has had very little to sing about.

In a sound-proof recording booth in the centre of Liberia's teeming capital, sweat beads on the forehead of 30-year-old Jonathan Koffa -- aka Takun J -- as he spits out a stream of improvised lyrics into a microphone.

A major exhibition of paintings by British artist Lucian Freud, including the final work he painted before his death in July, go on show to the public in London on Thursday.

Prince William's wife Catherine, who studied history of art at university, visited the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery on Wednesday before it opened to the public.

Islamist students halted the filming of an Egyptian television series at Cairo's Ain Shams University protesting against the "indecent “clothing of the actresses, the production company said Thursday.

Misr International films had obtained permission from the university's management to film on site, the head of the company, Gaby Khoury, told Agence France Presse.

The Great Altar of Pergamon, a sculpted frieze dating from the 2nd century BC and one of Berlin's top tourist attractions, will be closed for repair work from 2014, the museum said Tuesday.

The Pergamon Museum -- which opened to house the Ancient Greek masterpiece in 1930 on Berlin's renowned Museum Island -- will undergo a complete renovation in several phases, between October of this year and 2019.

Police said Wednesday a mob had stormed the Maldives national museum and smashed Buddhist statues, an act of vandalism which former president Mohamed Nasheed blamed on Islamic radicals.

"A mob entered the museum yesterday (Tuesday). They smashed many statues. This included some statues of Buddha," police spokesman Ahmed Shiyam told Agence France Presse.

The world's last surviving First World War veteran, who served in Britain's Women's Royal Air Force (WRAF), has died aged 110, British media reported.

Florence Green, who joined the WRAF as a 17-year-old in 1918, was believed to be the last veteran of the 1914-1918 conflict.

Britain marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens on Tuesday with the laying of a wreath at his grave in Westminster Abbey in London and a street party in his native Portsmouth.

Prince Charles and actor Ralph Fiennes, who will star in the latest film version of Dickens' masterpiece "Great Expectations", attended the ceremony in Poets' Corner at the abbey, where Dickens was buried in 1870.