San Francisco politicians and property groups are rolling out the welcome mat for George Lucas' collection of American art and movie memorabilia in an effort to keep the "Star Wars" creator from building his proposed museum in Chicago or Los Angeles.

Mayor Ed Lee had banners reading "George Lucas, please build your museum in San Francisco for the world to enjoy" hung Friday at both City Hall and the waterfront parcel known as Seawall Lot 330 that the city hopes will be the future home of the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Inca trails spanning six countries and a French cave with some of the earliest known paintings are among the sites expected to get World Heritage status at a UNESCO meeting that started Sunday in Doha.

Altogether at least 30 natural and cultural sites, including the Arbil Citadel in Iraq's Kurdistan, are vying to get the United Nations cultural body's prestigious distinction and add their names to an already 981-strong list.

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.