Rome's MAXXI art museum said Thursday it wanted a bigger role on the world stage with the appointment of its new Chinese-born artistic director Hou Hanru.

The contemporary art and architecture museum, housed in a building designed by renowned architect Zaha Hadid, has been plagued with financial troubles.

Venice has teemed with boats for centuries but a tragic gondola death has stirred anger on the canals and could change the face of the floating city's most famous waterway.

As the tourist's funeral was held on Friday in Germany with a delegation of gondoliers, tensions have risen between the boater-hatted sailors and pilots of "vaporetto" ferries that ply the island city.

An infamous cult leader known as "Black Jesus", who was suspected of cannibalism, has been chopped to death in a remote Papua New Guinea village, reports said Friday.

Steven Tari, a convicted rapist, had been on the run since escaping from a prison in Madang in the Pacific nation's east during a mass break-out with 48 others in March.

A two-hour drive from the French coast, Paris sets up an artificial seashore on the banks of the Seine each summer and while the beach may be fake, the seagulls overhead turn out to be real.

And the birds don't leave when the stretches of sand and deckchairs are removed ahead of the autumn chill.

The U.N.'s cultural organisation on Thursday urged Syria's regime and rebels to spare multi-millennial heritage that is being ravaged by shelling, theft and illegal digs.

"I urge all parties to take the necessary measures to prevent further damage to this heritage, which is among the most precious in the Islamic world," UNESCO chief Irina Bokova said.

Liberia's main public university said on Wednesday all 25,000 applicants for the new academic year had failed its entrance exam, prompting the president to describe poor education standards in the impoverished nation as a "national emergency".

The University of Liberia, which educates more than half of the country's students in the capital Monrovia, said it had been forced to admit 1,600 failed candidates for the new term which begins next month.

In the half century since Martin Luther King's march on Washington came to symbolize the Civil Rights struggle, black literature has found its place at the heart of American culture.

Before the era of King's march, which was marked on Wednesday when huge crowds returned to the scene of his speech on the National Mall, books by African Americans were little known and rarely studied or celebrated.

A rights commissioner in Indonesia Thursday joined the chorus of opposition to hosting the Miss World contest, saying the country should protect youth from being "poisoned" by foreign influences.

The UK-based organizers of the beauty pageant have faced opposition from Islamic hardline groups and clerics in the world's biggest Muslim-majority nation, even after they agreed to scrap bikinis in the beachwear round and use traditional sarongs.

An "ideal city" inspired by Renaissance humanism off the beaten track in the Tuscan hills is finding new fans with 15th century urban planning that still appeals to today's city dwellers.

"It looks idyllic!" said a tourist from Melbourne in Australia as she admired the harmonious mix of palazzi, churches and immaculately-kept homes of Pienza, a town of 2,000 people in the Italian region of Tuscany.

The Chinese town where the Dalai Lama was born is undergoing huge redevelopment, and behind a mountain the exiled spiritual leader's family home has received a makeover of its own, with a three-meter wall and security cameras installed.

The building in Hongai village, at the summit of a towering peak, is the only place in China dedicated to the man Beijing considers a violent separatist and a "wolf in monk's robes".