The Maldives on Thursday moved to limit dancing in public between men and women, an official and a report said, amid signs of the growing influence of the nation's hardline religious party.

The Islamic affairs ministry sent a circular "to all government institutions banning the holding of any mixed-gender dance events", the private Minivan newspaper said, quoting guidelines issued on Thursday.

President Vladimir Putin has urged the creation of a new sense of patriotism to serve as the basis of Russia's future to replace the vacuum left by the fall of the ideologically driven USSR.

Putin -- who has made restoring Russia's great-power status a chief aim of his rule -- said the country had forgotten to construct a sense of national pride and lashed out at opponents who "pour shit" over its name.

Sculptor El Anatsui, who was born in Ghana and lives and creates in Nigeria, has mined Africa's history and culture to carve, mold and weave forms that captivate viewers around the world.

"When I set out to do work, I want something that would arrest people at least, draw them closer, so they can decide for themselves whether it's really beautiful," he told art-lovers last week in Denver, Colorado.

A prominent Jewish rights group expressed fears Thursday of "another blood libel" against Jews stemming from a film mocking Islam that triggered riots in Muslim countries.

The amateur film denigrating the Prophet Mohammed was promoted by evangelical and Coptic Christians living in the United States, and the suspected producer is a Coptic Christian living in California.

A veteran Turkish journalist has characterized the World War I massacre of Armenians in his country as genocide in a new book, defying the government's stance on the sensitive issue.

Hasan Cemal -- a columnist with the Milliyet daily, and the grandson of WWI Ottoman Empire general Cemal Pasha -- lays out the evolution of his thinking on the issue in the book "1915: The Armenian Genocide".

"Have you ever seen any place in the world more wonderful?" swoons Grace Kelly, after whizzing round a hairpin bend above Monaco in an open-top car with Cary Grant, in the 1955 classic "To Catch a Thief."

The same hillside road would cost Kelly her life on September 14, 1982, yet 30 years on the Hollywood actress-turned-princess still symbolises the tiny Mediterranean principality she helped turn into an international jet set Mecca.

The earliest movies known to be shot in color have been revived by film archivists, who on Wednesday gave an audience at London's Science Museum a glimpse at cinema's first attempts to show us the world as we see it.

The obscure film segments were long considered failed prototypes, blurry flickers of color seen by no more than a handful of people before being consigned to an archive. But the National Media Museum in the northern England city of Bradford said digitization had effectively rescued the footage, unlocking remarkably modern-looking images created more than a century ago.

A museum scarcely bigger than a Paris flat sheds light on a momentous era for physics, a time of heroic individuals who made extraordinary discoveries but often at hideous risk.

Within the walls of the former "Radium Institute" in the city's Latin Quarter is the preserved laboratory of Marie Curie, central figure of the greatest dynasty in modern science.

British archaeologists announced on Wednesday that a skeleton found under a city centre car park in central England could be that of the medieval king Richard III.

Researchers from the University of Leicester said they had found a male skeleton with similarities to historical descriptions of Richard, who ruled England between 1483 and his death in battle in 1485.

The Afghan government has recommended legal action against two TV channels for allegedly broadcasting scantily dressed women and disseminating immorality, officials said Wednesday.

A ministry of information and culture official said stations Saba, which means dawn, and Setara, which means star -- were guilty of broadcasting songs, in which "there was lots of nudity".