In Iraq's national museum, home to some of the world's most precious artifacts of ancient Mesopotamia, a caption beside a skeleton simply reads in English: "dated to very old time."

And some of the museum's most impressive pieces carry no labels at all — like a giant stone head lying on the ground that may or may not belong on a nearby empty pedestal labeled "Assyrian King Nimrod," the Biblical tormentor of the patriarch Abraham.

Uruguay's legislature voted Wednesday to allow same-sex marriages nationwide, making it only the second Latin American country to do so.

The vote, with 71 of the 92 members of the lower house backing the measure, was welcomed with cries of "freedom, freedom" and "equality" from members of the public who burst into applause.

The wait is nearly over for thousands of readers eager to get their hands on the new novel by celebrated Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.

At least one major bookstore in Tokyo is flinging open its doors at midnight to cater to the demands of the most dedicated fans of the surrealist, craving their latest fix of one of modern literature's most talked-about authors.

Paris's Louvre museum was closed on Wednesday due to a walkout by some staff over a rise in aggressive pickpockets including children sometimes working in gangs of up to 30, staff and management said.

Disappointed tourists waited in vain in front of the famed museum, home to works of art such as the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo, which receives some 10 million visitors a year.

Cosmetics billionaire Leonard Lauder has given New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art an astonishing, no-strings-attached collection of Cubist art that he assembled over four decades, the museum announced Tuesday.

The enormous gift, estimated to be worth $1 billion, includes 78 works by Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Leger, and "will transform the museum," a statement said.

For a Shakespeare play with a twist, a Polish arts troupe cast inmates alongside professional actors in an effort to engage those on the sidelines of society.

The six men, whose crimes range from theft to battery resulting in death, performed their adaptation of the bard's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Warsaw's posh Polish Theater last weekend.

Tears roll down Heitaro Matsumoto's face as the 72-year-old businessman talks of an uncle who died on Guam as a Japanese soldier in the hopeless final weeks of World War II.

The remains of Goro Matsumoto, in his mid-20s at the time of his death, have never been recovered. Nor have those of 18,000 other Japanese soldiers who died on the island, now a tropical vacation spot for Japanese tourists.

Tribal peoples' advocacy group Survival International said Tuesday it had filed a court action in Paris in an effort to halt the sale of sacred objects from Arizona's Hopi indians.

Survival International, the London-based organization which lobbies for tribal peoples worldwide, said it had secured an 11th-hour court hearing in Paris on Friday where auctioneers Neret-Minet would attend.

Spanish economist and author Jose Luis Sampedro, one of the ideologues behind Spain's "indignant" protest movement against economic inequality and corruption, has died, his family said Tuesday.

Sampedro, who advocated a more humane economics based on ideas of solidarity, passed away overnight on Sunday and his remains were cremated on Tuesday morning, his widow Olga Lucas said.

Thousands from across the globe marched solemnly Monday at the former Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to honour the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust during World War II.

The mournful wail of the "shofar" -- a traditional Jewish ram's horn symbolizing freedom -- marked the beginning of the March of the Living, held this year for the 22nd time since 1988 in this southern Polish town where in 1940 Nazi Germany built Auschwitz, its most notorious death camp.