Author JK Rowling has told fans to be wary of false rumours regarding the plot of her final Harry Potter book. "There will always be sad individuals who get their kicks from ruining other people's fun," she said on her website. She hoped, however, that her readers would "embark on the last adventure they will share with [Harry] without knowing where they are they going". Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh instalment in the series, will be published on 21 July. Full Article

A French publishing group is to sue Google for publishing book excerpts online without permission. La Martiniere accuses the technology company of "counterfeiting and breach of intellectual property rights" by digitising about 100 of its titles. Google is scanning millions of books, allowing users to access the full text of works in the public domain or extracts from those under copyright. The publisher is demanding 100,000 euros (£69,000) for each book involved. La Martiniere owns the French company Le Seuil, along with Delachaux and Niestle in Switzerland and Harry N Abrams in the United States. The lawsuit will be filed in a court in Paris and will target both Google France and its parent company, the American group Google Inc. Full Article

The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has launched one of the UK's most ambitious theatre projects, in Shakespeare's birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon. The year-long Complete Works festival, which begins on the anniversary of the bard's death, will stage his sonnets, poems and all 37 Shakespeare plays. Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen are among the performers taking part. RSC artistic director Michael Boyd told the BBC that the event would be a "national knees-up". Full Article

All but one of the rare LDS books stolen recently have been recovered. Last week, thieves broke into the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum through a window. Once inside, they went directly to this display case and took 14 rare LDS texts, including two first edition copies of the Book of Mormon and early foreign language copies. A tip led police and postal inspectors to mailboxes in West Valley City this morning. They found an envelope addressed to, "President Hinckley, LDS Church, Important." Inside were two copies of the Book of Mormon, including one in Italian. Full Article

A rare book of Shakespeare's plays, considered to be one of the most important in British literature, is to be auctioned at Sotheby's in London. The complete first folio of the playwright's work had a print run of approximately 750 in 1623. However, only a third of these survive and most of them are incomplete. Full Article

Is the layoff the great American wound? In Louis Uchitelle's account, it seems a wound in triplicate. It hollows out companies so they can't compete. It hollows out the country by removing middle-class jobs. It hollows out the middle-class employees who are laid off and then too often drop permanently to a demeaning, low-wage way of life. To Mr. Uchitelle, who reports on economics for The New York Times, corporate America's addiction to the layoff has gone past the point of economic rationality. In this fascinating book he tries to tell the history of the United States in our time as the unchecked rise of layoffs. Full Article

A work of prodigious research, "Cobra II" will likely become the benchmark by which other histories of the Iraq invasion are measured. Note the word invasion. Cobra II was the name United States commanders gave the operation to depose Saddam Hussein's regime. It is the story of the planning, execution and immediate aftermath of that invasion that is related by Michael R. Gordon, The New York Times's chief military correspondent, and Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and former military correspondent for The Times, in "Cobra II." Full Article

A claim that Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code copied the ideas of two other authors has gone before London's High Court. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh say Mr Brown stole "the whole architecture" of research that went into their 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Both books contain the idea Jesus had a child. They are suing publisher Random House, which denies the allegation. Full Article