Eleven U.S. states sued President Barack Obama's administration Wednesday to try to overturn federal guidelines demanding that public schools allow transgender students to access the bathroom of their choice.

In the joint filing in U.S. District Court in Wichita Falls, Texas, the states accused the federal government of trying to rewrite laws by "executive fiat."

Indonesia's president Wednesday approved tough new punishments for child sex offenders, including a maximum penalty of death and chemical castration, after the brutal gang-rape and murder of a schoolgirl.

New York is packed with some of the most iconic tourist attractions in the world but there's a hot new ticket in town: Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

Americans from out of state, Israeli teenagers, a tourist group from China and Europeans -- all have been seen stopping off at the place that is the nerve center of Donald Trump's maverick campaign to win the White House.

Some days there is no train at all crossing the bridge to Uzbekistan, yawns a customs officer in Hairatan, formerly a teeming Silk Road border town whose decline is a barometer of economic depression in Afghanistan's north.

"The camel driver is at work; the caravan is being readied," proclaimed the mystic poet Rumi, born in Balkh province, where Hairatan is located and through which passes one of the routes of the ancient trade network. "He asks why we travelers are asleep."

Christie's auction house has been fined £3,250 ($4,750, 4,270 euros) for selling a piece of elephant ivory without the correct documentation, London police said Tuesday.

The silver-mounted tusk, put up for auction last year, did not have the right documentation under wildlife protection laws, a police statement said.

In an international battle stretching from Native American lands in the American West to the auction houses of Paris, two tribes on Tuesday renewed a years-long campaign to prevent the sale of sacred objects.

The Acoma Pueblo Nation located in New Mexico and The Hoopa Valley Tribal Nation of California have announced their opposition to a scheduled sale next week of close to 500 artifacts at Paris' EVE auction house.

A Malian jihadist will seek forgiveness from his people for attacking the world heritage site of Timbuktu when he pleads guilty at an unprecedented case before an international war crimes court, his lawyer said Tuesday.

The ashes of the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez will be laid to rest near his seaside home in Colombia on Sunday.

The bestselling author of the modern classic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" died in April 2014 in his adopted home of Mexico at the age of 87.

Pope Francis came under fire Friday after meeting Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the Lyon archbishop who is suspected of covering up for a pedophile priest in a scandal that has rocked the Church in France.

A Russian court on Thursday convicted artist Pyotr Pavlensky of vandalism for a 2014 performance called "Freedom" inspired by Ukraine's anti-government protests.