Seven couples have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutional prohibition on same-sex marriage in North Dakota, making it the last state in the country with a ban to be sued by gay couples seeking the right to wed in their home state.

Also on Friday, a federal judge struck down Wisconsin's ban, ruling it was unconstitutional.

A painting by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani sold at an auction in Paris Wednesday for 13.5 million euros ($18.3 million), a record for the artist's work in France, auction house Sotheby's announced.

The portrait of his main patron Paul Alexandre done in 1911-1912 had up to now been in the hands of Alexandre's family and was estimated at between five and eight million euros.

Star designer Rem Koolhaas said Thursday that adapting to architectural modernity can be a "painful process", as he prepared to unveil the program for Venice's architecture Biennale.

The Dutch designer is curating this year's program, which will look back over the past 100 years of innovation.

J.K. Rowling's publisher is laying off some employees amid a dispute with the industry's biggest book seller. Hachette Book Group cites a "changing marketplace" for layoffs that will affect less than 3 percent of its staff.

Hachette also publishes Stephenie Meyer, Stephen Colbert and other authors. It released a statement Thursday saying staff reductions were necessary for it to improve "resilience" in difficult times.

Two pairs of 3,300-year-old trousers found in China's far western Xinjiang region may be the world's oldest, state-media reported Friday.

Archeologists in May found animal-fur menswear on the bodies of two mummies, identified as male shamans in their 40s, the state-run China Daily cited scientists as saying.

Ask younger Iraqi Kurds if they speak Arabic, and they often say no, or not well -- a linguistic barrier with the country's Arabs stemming from a nationalist backlash against Saddam Hussein's brutality.

Most Iraqi Arabs do not speak Kurdish either, meaning some members of the country's two largest ethnic groups have no common language.

The last of the 29 Navajos who developed a code that stumped the Japanese during World War II has died.

Chester Nez, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, died Wednesday morning of kidney failure, said Judy Avila, who helped Nez write his memoirs. He was 93.

The Swiss museum designated as the sole heir of German collector Cornelius Gurlitt's trove of priceless art says it plans to vet the collection first before deciding whether to accept it.

Gurlitt died last month, two years after German authorities seized more than 1,000 artworks from his Munich apartment. Some of the items — including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall — may have been looted from Jewish owners under Nazi rule.

Original drawings and poems created by John Lennon for his acclaimed books "In His Own Write" and "A Spaniard in the Works" will go on the auction block.

The books' British publisher, Tom Maschler, has owned the material for a half century and is offering it for sale at Sotheby's on Wednesday. It is the largest private collection of the Beatle's work to come to the market, the auction house said, and prices range from $500 to $70,000.

China on Wednesday imposed smothering security in central Beijing on the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, a bloody watershed in history that remains taboo in the communist nation. 

Counting down to the anniversary, the United States demanded the release of scores of people detained in the run-up, as the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong prepared for an annual candlelit vigil that this year is expected to draw as many as 200,000 attendees.