The Sistine Chapel choir will perform in Hong Kong for the first time in September but will not visit mainland China despite efforts to improve the rocky relations between Beijing and the Vatican.

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told Agence France Presse on Monday that the choral group, one of the oldest religious choirs in the world, will sing in Macao on September 19, followed by concerts in Hong Kong and Taipei on September 21 and 23.

French President Francois Hollande will Monday lead celebrations to mark the 70th anniversary of the joyful liberation of Paris after four long and bitter years of Nazi occupation in World War II.

Parisians will mark the event just as their parents and grandparents did seven decades ago -- with a mass dance at City Hall.

Free-wheeling and business-oriented, the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is a long way from Beijing physically, culturally and linguistically -- and hackles have been raised by reports Communist authorities are demanding local television drop Cantonese in favor of Mandarin.

Throughout China, Mandarin -- known as Putonghua, the "common language", with its roots in Beijing's northern dialect -- is the medium of government, education and national official media.

Archaeologists excavating a large burial mound in northern Greece that has captivated the public's imagination have asked politicians and others seeking guided tours of the site to leave them in peace.

The Culture Ministry appealed Thursday for "understanding" while the Amphipolis excavation proceeds.

The liberation of the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Paris by the writer Ernest Hemingway 70 years ago, as the French capital was freed from its Nazi occupiers, is the stuff of legend.

Hemingway, a war correspondent for the American "Collier's" magazine who went on to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1954, was embedded with U.S. 4th Division troops that landed on the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944.

Sliding into shabbiness after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a giant Moscow complex extolling the days of the old planned economy has been restored amid a wave of nostalgia for Russia's past.

The Exhibition of Achievements of the People's Economy, or VDNKh, opened in 1939 to trumpet Soviet successes while the capitalist world was stuck in a deep depression.

Hyenas howl and feast on flesh every night outside the ancient walls of Harar -- one of Islam's holiest cities that is holding out against the pressures of the modern world.

But change is coming, and campaigners are working hard to preserve the gated Ethiopian city's unique history, cultural and religious traditions.

An infamous Nazi-Soviet pact that divided up Europe on the eve of World War II turns 75 on Saturday, with Moscow and the West still engaged in a scarcely hid rivalry to expand their influence across the continent.

On August 23, 1939 then Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his Nazi counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a non-aggression pact between their two countries in Moscow.

Nearly five percent of Japanese adults are addicted to gambling, a rate up to five times that of most other nations, according to a study.

The study, released to local media on Wednesday, also showed rising adult addiction to the Internet and alcohol in a society long known for its tolerance of boozing and its love of technology.

A Dutch museum said on Wednesday it would delay the return of Crimean archaeological treasures it is exhibiting, fearing a legal tussle with either Russia or Ukraine.

The priceless medieval artefacts, on loan from four Crimean museums, went on display at Amsterdam's Allard Pierson Museum in February, less than a month before the peninsula was annexed by Russia.