J.K. Rowling's publisher is laying off some employees amid a dispute with the industry's biggest book seller. Hachette Book Group cites a "changing marketplace" for layoffs that will affect less than 3 percent of its staff.

Hachette also publishes Stephenie Meyer, Stephen Colbert and other authors. It released a statement Thursday saying staff reductions were necessary for it to improve "resilience" in difficult times.

Two pairs of 3,300-year-old trousers found in China's far western Xinjiang region may be the world's oldest, state-media reported Friday.

Archeologists in May found animal-fur menswear on the bodies of two mummies, identified as male shamans in their 40s, the state-run China Daily cited scientists as saying.

Ask younger Iraqi Kurds if they speak Arabic, and they often say no, or not well -- a linguistic barrier with the country's Arabs stemming from a nationalist backlash against Saddam Hussein's brutality.

Most Iraqi Arabs do not speak Kurdish either, meaning some members of the country's two largest ethnic groups have no common language.

The last of the 29 Navajos who developed a code that stumped the Japanese during World War II has died.

Chester Nez, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, died Wednesday morning of kidney failure, said Judy Avila, who helped Nez write his memoirs. He was 93.

The Swiss museum designated as the sole heir of German collector Cornelius Gurlitt's trove of priceless art says it plans to vet the collection first before deciding whether to accept it.

Gurlitt died last month, two years after German authorities seized more than 1,000 artworks from his Munich apartment. Some of the items — including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall — may have been looted from Jewish owners under Nazi rule.

Original drawings and poems created by John Lennon for his acclaimed books "In His Own Write" and "A Spaniard in the Works" will go on the auction block.

The books' British publisher, Tom Maschler, has owned the material for a half century and is offering it for sale at Sotheby's on Wednesday. It is the largest private collection of the Beatle's work to come to the market, the auction house said, and prices range from $500 to $70,000.

China on Wednesday imposed smothering security in central Beijing on the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, a bloody watershed in history that remains taboo in the communist nation. 

Counting down to the anniversary, the United States demanded the release of scores of people detained in the run-up, as the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong prepared for an annual candlelit vigil that this year is expected to draw as many as 200,000 attendees.

Chan Koonchung's novel "The Fat Years", set in a China of the near-future where a dark moment of history has been erased from public memory, has never been published on the mainland.

The book released in 2009 presents a dystopian vision of 2013 in which China's rise coincides with the economic weakening of the West. Fiction chimed with reality when it was first released at the height of the financial crisis. 

Unexploded bombs and shells from World War II remain a major hazard in western France that has been poorly investigated, the French environmental group Robin des Bois said on Monday.

"Around 600,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped on France between June 1940 and May 1945, and around 15 percent of that did not explode," its president, Jacky Bonnemains, said.

To find the world's only museum chronicling the brutal crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen protests, look for the skinny office building wedged between a Tibetan-themed pub and a sports bar on a side street on the edge of a Hong Kong tourist district.

With nothing to indicate its location, aside from a listing on the lobby directory, there's no clue for passers-by that it houses the June 4th Museum, dedicated to preserving the memory of one of the darkest periods in China's recent past through photographs, artifacts, videos and written histories of the events.