Los Angeles County's Natural History Museum on Friday unveiled the "Blue Moon Diamond," a 12-carat gem described as one of the rarest stones in the world.

Deep blue and intensely radiant, it was found in South Africa's Cullinan mine northeast of Pretoria, where the biggest ever rough diamond was unearthed a century ago.

The hot-button social issue of same-sex marriage is widely expected to come before the United States Supreme Court once more as the court opens its new session.

The following are facts about same-sex marriage in the United States:

Nearly half of all girls in South Asia marry before they turn 18, according to a United Nations report that lays bare what it calls "glaring inequalities".

The report, published by the UN children's agency UNICEF on Thursday, also revealed that more than a million newborn babies still die every year in the region, often due to inadequate healthcare.

Archaeologists inching through a large 2,300-year-old tomb in northern Greece on Thursday uncovered two marble female statues flanking the entrance to one of three underground chambers, in another sign of the unusual attention and expense lavished on the unknown person buried there.

The dig has gripped the public imagination amid non-stop media coverage, which Greek archaeologists say is placing an unfair burden on the excavation team.

Conjuring up the hedonistic world of 1980s New York -- the endless parties, reckless spending, casual sex and drugs -- was the easiest part of US writer Robert Goolrick's latest novel.

The former high-flying advertising executive moved to New York as a young man from small town America and lived out what he saw as a dream.

While North America has produced a wealth of prize-winning English-language writers, the continent's Francophone writers have largely worked in obscurity.

Often mistakenly linked to Canada's Quebec province, this rich modern literary tradition -- alive in French-speaking enclaves from Louisiana to New Brunswick to Manitoba -- nevertheless has a spirit all its own.

A shiny new Islamic art museum and cultural center will open in Toronto next week, becoming the first of its kind in North America.

Bankrolled by Prince Karim Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of Ismaili Muslims, the facility will feature more than 1,000 artifacts -- including rare scriptures of the Quran from the 7th and 8th centuries‎.

When workers began renovating Murad Khane district, a jewel of Old Kabul that breaks up the city's otherwise bland facade of concrete high-rises and blast-walls, it was hidden under piles of garbage.

Now the teeming quarter is home to bustling bazaars, a revitalized calligraphy and woodwork school and a courtyard that won a UNESCO conservation award last year.

British painter JMW Turner is the star of London's cultural scene again with a major exhibition that opened Wednesday, a rare auction of his works and an upcoming biopic.

The exhibition "Late Turner: Painting Set Free" at Tate Britain is the first major show dedicated to the last productive and creatively experimental years of the painter's life between his 60th birthday in 1835 and his death in 1851.

A vast complex of monuments surrounding Britain's prehistoric Stonehenge site has been revealed using hi-tech underground scanning, archaeologists said Wednesday.

The mysterious circle of standing stones, on Salisbury Plain in southwest England, is one of the most iconic ancient sites in Europe and was long thought to stand alone.