A Hong Kong employee of a publishing firm known for producing books critical of the Chinese government has gone missing, his wife said Friday, following the earlier apparent disappearance of four colleagues.  

It is the latest incident to fuel growing unease in Hong Kong at the erosion of freedoms in the semi-autonomous Chinese city, with fears that the five men may have been detained by Chinese authorities.

Married couples in China will from Friday be allowed to have two children, after concerns over an ageing population and shrinking workforce ushered in an end to the country's controversial one-child policy.

The change, which was announced in October by the ruling Communist Party, takes effect from January 1, 2016, Beijing's official Xinhua news agency reported over the weekend.

France's decision to open up archives from its World War II collaboration with Nazi occupiers is being seen as breaking one of the last taboos that has poisoned debate about the era for years.

"This brings an end to the fear of scandal. We are taking responsibility and we will have a better understanding of the issues," said Gilles Morin, a historian who heads the association of users of national archives.

Pope Francis faces a tough 2016, Vatican insiders say, with no let-up in his physically demanding schedule or the political battles over his efforts to modernize the Church.

The 79-year-old pontiff, who eschews holidays and has appeared worn out at times during the last year, has already scheduled major trips to Mexico (February) and Poland (July).

Islamist group Hamas has banned public New Year's Eve parties in the Gaza Strip because they offend the territory's "values and religious traditions," police said on Wednesday.

"The interior ministry and police department did not give permits to any restaurants, hotels or halls for end-of-year parties" after several venues requested permission, police spokesman Ayman al-Batinji told AFP.

The toxic legacy of colonialism in Africa has stirred up a heated debate in Britain involving a prestigious Oxford University college, some high-powered alumni and a student campaign boosted by social media.

The focus of the debate is an unremarkable limestone statue looking down on Oxford's High Street of Cecil Rhodes, the Victorian-era tycoon who founded the De Beers diamond company and what is now Zimbabwe.

An Egyptian court has reduced the jail term for a controversial Muslim scholar convicted of insulting Islam on his television show from five years to one, judicial officials and his lawyer said Tuesday.

Islam al-Behairy faced an uproar in April after remarks he made on his program "With Islam", in which he called for reforms in "traditional Islamic discourse."

Taiwan called on Japan Tuesday to apologize and compensate the island's wartime sex slaves after Tokyo and Seoul reached an agreement on the emotive issue.

Japan offered a "heartfelt apology" and a one-billion yen ($8.3 million) payment to the South Koreans, euphemistically known as "comfort women", who were forced into Japanese military brothels during World War II.

Japanese first lady Akie Abe said she has again visited the controversial Yasukuni war shrine in Tokyo, posting photos of the site on the same day Japan and South Korea struck a landmark agreement on wartime sex slaves.

"My final visit of the year," Abe, wife of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, wrote Monday on her Facebook page, also noting that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

A new Chinese translation of Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's poetry collection "Stray Birds" has been pulled from bookshop shelves, the publisher said, after controversy erupted over its unusually sexual content.

The work, originally in Bengali, was first published in 1916, three years after Tagore won the Nobel literature prize for "his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", the first non-European to do so.