Gambia will drop English as its official language, President Yahya Jammeh said in his latest diatribe against former colonial power Britain.

"We're going to speak our own language," he said, without specifying which of the poor west African country's indigenous tongues would replace English.

Nobel laureates Mo Yan and Elfriede Jelinek are among the finalists for a prize honoring fiction translated into English.

University of Rochester-based Three Percent announced the long list of 25 nominees Tuesday for the Best Translated Book Award. The winning author and translator each will receive $5,000 from Amazon.com.

The only known specimen of the first official banknote issued in Australia, uncovered in Scotland, is expected to fetch at least Aus$250,000 (U.S.$224,000) at an auction in Sydney this month, officials said Wednesday.

The ten shilling note, issued on the order of New South Wales governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1817 by the Bank of New South Wales (now called Westpac) on the day it opened, is expected to attract bids from collectors around the world.

A group of Tunisian prostitutes demanded Tuesday to be allowed back to work, 18 months after their brothel in the resort town of Sousse was attacked by hardline Salafists and closed down.

A delegation handed deputy parliament speaker Meherzia Laabidi, a woman, a petition signed by 120 prostitutes calling for their brothel in the popular coastal resort to be allowed to reopen.

The importance of language in the escalating crisis in Ukraine came to the fore when Russian President Vladimir Putin justified deploying troops in Crimea by saying Moscow needed to protect Russian-speakers there.

Traditionally, the west of the country as well as the capital Kiev has been Ukrainian-speaking, while the east and south -- closer to Russia and including the explosive peninsula of Crimea -- speak Russian.

Human rights groups have questioned the wisdom of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London taking a production of Hamlet to North Korea, but stopped short of calling for the plan to be scrapped.

The Globe will perform the play in the secretive state in September 2015 as part of a global tour marking the 450th anniversary of the English playwright's birth.

Steam rises from a gourd filled with yerba mate as Wissam al-Halabi takes a sip, seated on a Lebanese mountain slope where the South American drink has become a local tradition.

For more than a century, the mountain folk have been enjoying the slightly bitter hot drink, pronounced "yer-bah mah-tay," far from its origins half-way around the world.

Nestled in the Texas high desert about an hour from the Mexican border, Marfa appears, at first glance, to be hidden from the outside world.

With a population of only 1,900, the city that began life as a railroad stop feels like a backwater, with fading buildings, modest homes and dormant streets.

Celaya, an industrial city in the heart of Mexico, now has a Japanese language class where the teacher uses honorifics, addressing her students as "Felipe-san" or "Christian-san."

Across town, a hotel installed a special satellite dish on its rooftop to capture a Japanese TV channel while receptionists greet visitors by saying "konnichiwa" ("hello").

Seven years in the making and costing nearly $20 million, the first Indian film museum is set to open in the home of Bollywood, more than 100 years after the country's celebrated movie industry was born.

The government-funded National Museum of Indian Cinema, set in an elegant 19th century heritage bungalow in south Mumbai, traces Indian cinema's history from the black-and-white silent era to its musical modern blockbusters.