A bitter spat over one of Berlin's best-loved art collections, a clutch of invaluable Old Master paintings, came to a head this week with the German government vowing to find a compromise.

Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said he would help forge a consensus in the row over plans to move the masterpieces currently housed at the world-renowned Gemaeldegalerie to the German capital's UNESCO-listed Museum Island.

Google on Tuesday unveiled an online information exchange platform to try to give some extra lasting power to more than 3,000 endangered languages.

Called endangeredlanguages.com, it is out to help improve the exchange of digital source materials in languages spoken by small numbers of people, from Navajo in the United States, to Aragonese in Spain, to Koro in India and Burunge in Tanzania.

Backed by its gastronomy, martial arts, music and manga culture, Brazil's small but influential Japanese community is wielding soft power to assert ethnic pride and preserve century-old ties.

Japanese Brazilians are among the most successful and well-integrated of the South American giant's communities but keep in touch with their roots through events like the annual Festival of Japan, which wrapped up Sunday in Sao Paulo.

Australian billionaire Clive Palmer Tuesday said his modern-day version of the Titanic will retain the first, second and third-class divisions of the original and include a new "safety" deck.

Releasing the preliminary plans and drawings for the Titanic II, which is to be built in China, mining tycoon Palmer said the massive vessel would have the original nine decks plus an additional safety deck.

Britain's Tate Modern opens the former power station's giant underground oil tanks as an art space on Wednesday, vastly increasing the capacity of the world's most visited modern art gallery.

The tanks -- which measure 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter and seven meters high and once held one million gallons of oil -- are designed to accommodate giant installations, as well as host performances and projections.

For six years U.S. General Douglas MacArthur was lord of all he surveyed as supreme commander of the Allied forces in occupied Japan, gazing over Tokyo from a building requisitioned from an insurance company.

Now, more than 60 years after Japan began governing itself again, his office is being opened to the public, just as he left it.

Nelson Mandela's handwritten memoirs were smuggled off South Africa's Robben Island to become an international bestseller after his release from 27 years in apartheid jail.

The manuscript's risky passage is just one of the extraordinary journeys of the island's books and the lengths taken to obtain, protect and share them in cells where learning and reading were celebrated.

From a teak clubhouse where British officers once sipped gin to an old English department store dubbed "Harrods of the East" -- the race is on to save Myanmar's colonial jewels from the wrecking ball.

Six decades after the country also known as Burma won its independence, the grandeur of the British Raj lives on in the elegant but crumbling 19th and early 20th century buildings that dot the former capital Yangon.

From the Bible of a murdered Pakistani government minister to the prayer book of a slain San Salvador archbishop, a Rome church has created a unique memorial to modern-day Christian martyrs.

At a time of outrage over anti-Christian violence in Africa, the exhibits at the Basilica of Saint Bartholomew are a poignant testament to thousands of Christians killed for their faith around the world over the past century.

Shanta Chaudhary was eight years old when her parents sold her into effective slavery for $75, sending her to scrub, cook and sweep for 19 hours a day at the house of a stranger in southwestern Nepal.

Now a strident rights campaigner, politician and one of the country's most influential women, she weeps as she recalls 18 years spent as a "kamlari", rising at 4:00 am, receiving regular beatings and witnessing rape and abuse.