A federal judge on Friday put same-sex marriages in Wisconsin on hold, a week after she struck down the state's same-sex marriage ban as unconstitutional, a move that allowed more than 500 couples to wed over the last eight days.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb's ruling Friday means that gay marriages will end while the appeal from Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is pending. Couples who were in the middle of the five-day waiting period to get a license, which most counties waived, are caught in limbo.

A 122.52-carat blue diamond has been discovered in the South African mine where the world's largest gem was unearthed more than a centry ago. 

Petra Diamonds Cullinan said the "exceptional" jewel was found in the Cullinan mine east of Pretoria, which has supplied stones for Britain's crown jewels. 

Tens of thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv Friday for Israel's annual Gay Pride parade, with city hall pulling out all the stops to welcome visitors.

Some 30,000 tourists had arrived for the event in Israel's coastal commercial capital, the municipality estimated, and joined many times that number of revelers dancing aboard floats blasting out electronic music.

Spain has proudly put on show tens of thousands of silver coins from a 19th-century shipwreck that it won back in court from U.S. treasure hunters.

The country's soon-to-be king, Felipe, and future queen Letizia on Thursday launched the exhibition in central Madrid celebrating the return of the sunken treasure to Spain.

A new young-adult trilogy to launch in October with "Endgame: The Calling" is at the center of an interactive project that includes a puzzle that leads to a key that leads — at least for one lucky person — to $500,000 in gold coins.

The subsequent two books will have progressively larger payouts, and all will require the use of a website that has not yet gone live, publisher HarperCollins said.

The Vietnamese spirit medium dances in a trance, attacking invisible enemies with a sword as drums beat, musicians chant, and dozens of curious onlookers watch in amazement.

Civil servant by day and practitioner of traditional spiritual possession rituals when the mood takes her, Nguyen Thi Hoa is clad in a richly embroidered red robe as she performs a Len Dong ceremony at a private Hanoi temple.

More than one million pupils in state-funded schools in England -- one in six -- do not speak English as their first language, official figures out Thursday showed.

The number has swelled by a third in the last five years to 1.11 million children, or 16.6 percent, according to the Department for Education statistics for January 2014.

A group of experts confirmed on Wednesday that a Matisse painting found in the possession of the reclusive son of a German art dealer linked to Adolf Hitler was "Nazi loot" taken from a Jewish art dealer in Paris.

Matisse's "Seated Woman" was among a treasure trove of art discovered in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father Hildebrand was tasked by the Nazis with selling artwork stolen from Jewish families in the 1930s and 1940s. 

For the painters, musicians, sculptors and writers who have inspired this art-loving country for centuries, their works are the truest memorials, whether concertos of Antonio Vivaldi still regularly performed in the Venice church where he served as violin master or Michelangelo's masterpieces that pack crowds daily into the Vatican's Sistine Chapel.

As Leonardo da Vinci once said, "A work of art dies not."

Mariam Saleh avoids malls and outdoor markets on the weekends because the low-cut tops, sheer dresses and miniskirts that foreign women wear reveal much more than she would like her impressionable young children to see.

Saleh is part of a campaign in Qatar that was spurred by locals who are fed up with the way many tourists and visitors dress, especially as temperatures soar in the Gulf Arab nation. The campaigners say Qatar is, after all, their country, and they should not be the ones feeling uncomfortable because visitors want to show some skin or dress like they would back home.