Have you spent your life hunting for the perfect wife? Maybe you have met the one but are feeling gun shy?

An Iowa jeweler is offering free rifles for husbands-to-be who spend at least $1,999 on an engagement ring at his store near Iowa City.

Judges are choosing the winner of Britain's most prestigious literary trophy from a shortlist that includes novels set in the court of King Henry VIII and the opium dens of Mumbai.

Hilary Mantel is favored to win the 50,000 pound ($82,000) Booker Prize with "Bring Up the Bodies," a tale of Tudor treachery centered on the king's right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell. It is a sequel to "Wolf Hall," for which Mantel won in 2009.

How cool is this: Johnny Depp is going to help run a publishing imprint.

Already on the list of books is one by Bob Dylan, "The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan," which aims to set the record straight on the songwriter's enigmatic life and career and will be based in part on interviews with Dylan by best-selling historian Douglas Brinkley.

Two American scholars won the Nobel economics prize Monday for work on match-making — how to pair doctors with hospitals, students with schools, kidneys with transplant recipients and even men with women in marriage.

Lloyd Shapley of UCLA and Alvin Roth, a Harvard University professor currently visiting at Stanford University, found ways to make markets work when traditional economic tools fail.

Inspired by the Pompidou Center in Paris, which for nearly two years removed all the men's art from its modern galleries, the Seattle Art Museum is letting women take over its downtown building this fall.

Lovers of art by men can still get their fill in the museum's Renaissance, Asian and Native art galleries, but those who want to explore art from this past century will be studying the contribution of women to photography, video, painting and sculpture.

Liam Neeson's "Taken 2" has defended its box-office title with a narrow win over Ben Affleck's "Argo."

Sunday studio estimates put 20th Century Fox's action sequel "Taken 2" at No. 1 with $22.5 million in its second weekend. "Taken 2" raised its domestic total to $86.8 million.

China's beloved national symbol — the panda — may have been seen quite differently by ancient humans: as food.

Scientist Wei Guangbiao says prehistoric man ate pandas in an area that is now part of the city of Chongqing in southwest China.

Wildlife researchers say 25 species of monkeys, langurs, lemurs and gorillas are on the brink of extinction and need global action to protect them from increasing deforestation and illegal trafficking.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature said Monday that primates from Asia and Africa are severely threatened. Six of the species live on the island nation of Madagascar.

Shots that protect against cervical cancer do not make girls promiscuous, according to the first study to compare medical records for vaccinated and unvaccinated girls.

The researchers didn't ask girls about having sex, but instead looked at "markers" of sexual activity after vaccination against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, or HPV. Specifically, they examined up to three years of records on whether girls had sought birth control advice; tests for sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy; or had become pregnant.

Scattered across the carefully landscaped main campus of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are the staff on the front lines fighting a rare outbreak of fungal meningitis: A scientist in a white lab coat peers through a microscope at fungi on a glass slide. In another room, another researcher uses what looks like a long, pointed eye dropper to suck up DNA samples that will be tested for the suspect fungus.

Not far away in another building is the emergency operations center, which is essentially the war room. There's a low hum of voices as employees work the phones, talking to health officials, doctors and patients who received potentially contaminated pain injections believed to be at the root of the outbreak. Workers sit at rows of computers, gathering data, advising doctors and reaching out to thousands of people who may have been exposed. Overall, dozens of people are working day and night to bring the outbreak under control. More than 200 people in 14 states have been sickened, including 15 who have died.