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.

Little-known works by the younger sister of famed artist Georgia O'Keeffe will take center stage at an exhibit that will debut at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2017 before going on tour.

The exhibit will feature about 40 paintings, watercolors, prints and drawings by Ida O'Keeffe, along with photographs of her taken in the 1920s by her sister's husband, acclaimed photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

Meet the latest bookstore owner: "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" author Jeff Kinney.

The beloved children's writer surprised and delighted a breakfast gathering Friday at BookExpo America, publishing's annual national convention, by announcing that he and his wife are converting the site of an abandoned general store in Plainville, Massachusetts, where Kinney and his wife live.

Hillary Rodham Clinton made a brief, private appearance Friday at publishing's annual national convention, BookExpo America, and offered booksellers a few details about her upcoming memoir, "Hard Choices."

Clinton's publisher, Simon & Schuster, told The Associated Press that the former secretary of state and possible presidential candidate met in the late morning with some 100 American and international booksellers for about 45 minutes. The event was not open to the press and Clinton departed without visiting the floor of the Jacob K. Javits Center.

An Australian gallery will return a portrait once thought the work of Vincent Van Gogh to its rightful owners in what is believed to be the country's first restitution of art lost under the Nazis.

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) said it accepted that 'Head of a man' was part of a forced sale by German Jew Richard Semmel in 1933 and should be returned to his heirs.  

Thousands of gold and silver coins pulled from a 19th-century shipwreck went on show in a Spanish museum on Thursday after Spain won them from U.S. treasure hunters in a court battle.

The cargo from the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes warship came to Spain in 2012 after a five-year legal battle with Odyssey, the U.S. company that hauled it up two centuries after it sank.

He may have had a twisted spine, but England's King Richard III was no hunchback, according to a new analysis of the medieval king's skeleton.

After the bones of the 15th-century king were discovered under a parking lot in central England in 2012, scientists scanned the remains of Richard III's back and created replicas of each bone to reconstruct his spine. The researchers said while Richard III had a severe case of scoliosis, he was far from the limping "hunchbacked toad" with a withered arm depicted in William Shakespeare's play.