The glory of the male form is the focus of Paris's Musee d'Orsay program this autumn, with hundreds of naked men waiting to adorn its illustrious walls: all in the name of art, of course.

The "Masculin/Masculin" exhibition will exhibit 200 works about male nudes from as far back as 1800, and the art crowd in the French capital is already buzzing about the "out of favour" male physique finally going on show in one of the world's greatest museums.

The number of Britons who are religious has declined significantly in the last 30 years and the number of adherents to the established Church of England has halved, a survey revealed on Tuesday.

Just 52 percent of people said they belong to a religion, down from 68 percent in 1983, according to the latest British Social Attitudes survey, which has been conducted every year for the last three decades.

The Swiss parliament voted Tuesday to raise the legal prostitution age from 16 to 18, tightening the country's liberal sex-trade laws to bring them in line with European standards.

The lower house of parliament voted to change the Swiss penal code to make it illegal to pay for sex with a minor, following suit after the upper house adopted the bill.

Women make up only one percent of Afghanistan's police force and as a result women are reluctant to seek justice for rising levels of violence, international aid agency Oxfam said Tuesday.

There is an average of one female police officer for every 10,000 women in Afghanistan, where reports of violence against women rose by 25 percent in 2011-2012, Oxfam said in a report.

The United States returned a Roman wine pitcher and five gold artifacts to Afghanistan on Monday in the fourth official repatriation of stolen Afghan cultural treasures in eight years.

Kabul's ambassador to Washington, Eklil Hakimi, accepted the objects from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency during a ceremony at the Afghan embassy.

A painting that sat for six decades in a Norwegian industrialist's attic after he was told it was a fake Van Gogh was pronounced the real thing Monday, making it the first full-size canvas by the tortured Dutch artist to be discovered since 1928.

Experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam authenticated the 1888 landscape "Sunset at Montmajour" with the help of Vincent Van Gogh's letters, chemical analysis of the pigments and X-rays of the canvas.

Saudi Arabia said Monday it will outlaw the dissemination of information on the Internet for the benefit of "terrorist" groups, in line with a decision taken by Gulf Arab monarchies.

The official SPA news agency said the cabinet approved the "unified legislation against cybercrime," which the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) adopted in December.

The discovery of a World War II amphibious vehicle on the bottom of an Italian lake is raising hopes among a group of American veterans that the remains of two dozen of their comrades will be found and possibly recovered for burial in the U.S.

The Italian volunteer organization that found the truck on the bottom of Lake Garda last December believes it's the same one that sank in 1945, killing 24 of the 25 U.S. soldiers aboard the open-topped vehicle known as a DUKW (duhk).

It may still have a small following, but one dance company is determined to bring ballet, with its roots in the Italian Renaissance, to urban South Africa.

Onstage pirouettes, jetes and turnouts are still very much a foreign concept for most Africans, but the South African Mzansi Ballet wants to change that.

They eat, sleep and raise their children beneath the stage floorboards and when dusk falls Thailand's travelling theaters come to life with ornate costumes, colorful face paint and high-pitched Chinese opera.

It is a generations-old way of life for the nomadic performers who tour venues ranging from sport stadiums to small Chinese shrines in back alleys. But faced with an uncertain future as the troupes struggle to attract younger audiences, supporters are turning to the Internet to widen their appeal.