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.

Nicolas Chow places a magnifying glass against a Ming Dynasty vase to inspect the potter's 600-year old workmanship.

Chow, the international head of Chinese ceramics and works of art at auction giant Sotheby's, points out layers of uneven bubbles invisible to the naked eye along the early 15th Century blue and white porcelain.

Dozens of mostly Egyptian objects from the 4th to 7th centuries AD which had been missing since the end of World War II have been unearthed and returned to a Berlin museum, officials said Monday.

The 44 pieces were identified as being part of the Bode Museum's collection of Byzantine art after being stored for decades in two boxes at Leipzig University's Egyptian Museum in eastern Germany.

Sixty works by leading post-war American artists including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol feature in a new exhibition opening on Tuesday at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.

The show entitled "The Guggenheim: The American Avant-garde 1945-1980" will run until May 6 and looks at the most seminal artistic movements of the era, from abstract expressionism to Pop Art to minimalism and conceptual art.