Switzerland, which prides itself on its humanitarian principles, is facing a barrage of criticism over its treatment of asylum seekers, including charges of segregation and inhumane living conditions.

The controversy first broke last week when federal migration authorities said the small northern town of Bremgarten, with 6,500 residents, had been permitted to deny residents of a new asylum center access to certain public spaces.

David Baldacci has decided to enter the fantasy world.

The best-selling thriller writer has a deal with Scholastic Inc. for a young adult novel, "The Finisher." Scholastic, a top U.S. children's publisher, announced Monday that the book is scheduled to come out in March.

As a teenager radicalized by China's Cultural Revolution, Zhang Hongbing denounced his mother to the authorities. Two months later a firing squad shot her dead.

Now after more than 40 years of mounting guilt, Zhang has ruffled the silence that cloaks China's decade of turmoil with a public confession.

A Bucharest court on Tuesday opened and then immediately adjourned the trial of six Romanians charged with a spectacular heist from a Dutch museum, some of whose stolen masterpieces by Monet, Picasso and Gauguin are feared to have been burned.

The court president postponed the trial to September 10 to allow time for several legal issues to be examined, including calls for some of the suspects to be released on bail.

Sophisticated leather-working equipment found in a cave in France offer the first evidence that Neanderthals had more advanced bone tools than early modern humans, researchers said Monday.

The four fragments of hide-softening bone tools known as lissoirs, or smoothers, were found at two neighboring sites in southwestern France, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Aristotle, Plato and Socrates have resurfaced in Athens in the midst of Greece's harrowing economic crisis, brought to life by a global philosophy congress in the very locations they once frequented.

"It's very important to find oneself in the place where philosophy was born," said Ivorian professor Tanella Boni, one of over 2,000 philosophers from 105 countries who attended the seven-day event which wrapped this weekend.

Major art thefts around the world over the past decade, as the trial of six Romanians accused of stealing seven masterpieces from a Dutch museum last October is set to open on Tuesday in Bucharest:

October 16, 2012: Seven masterpieces, including works by Picasso, Matisse, Monet and Gauguin, were stolen in a pre-dawn heist at Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum. Prosecutors say the paintings were worth 18 million euros ($24 million), although experts initially put their collective value at up to 100 million euros.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has reinstated the imperial name of a train station outside Saint Petersburg that is used by tens of thousands of tourists visiting the former palaces of the tsars, state media said Sunday.

Medvedev ordered the train station to use its original name of "Tsarskoe Selo" (Tsar's Village), which it lost almost a century ago in 1918 shortly after the Bolshevik revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty, according to a government decree.

The Kentucky museum where dinosaurs and biblical characters coexist has rolled out new exhibits and attractions — some with no religious message — to try to bring in new visitors.

The Creation Museum has added a bug exhibit that would fit right in at a natural science center, an outdoor zip line course and a display examining whether the dragons of ancient tales were actually dinosaurs.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington said Friday it's ramping up its photography collection with the acquisition of 100 images from the late Irving Penn.

They include rare street photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, most of them unpublished, as well as images from post-war Europe and examples of Penn's iconic fashion, portrait and still-life photography.