Little Amal, a 12-foot (3.7-meter) puppet of a Syrian refugee, will journey across the United States this fall, visiting key places in America's history to raise awareness about immigration and migration.

The puppet of the 10-year-old girl will visit the U.S. Capitol, Boston Common, Joshua Tree National Park and the Edmund Pettus Bridge among other sites during a trek which starts in Boston on Sept. 7 and ends Nov. 5 along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The start of June marks the beginning of Pride month around the U.S. and some parts of the world, a season to celebrate the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ communities and to protest against recent attacks on hard-won civil rights gains.

This year's Pride takes place in a contentious political climate in which some state legislators have sought to ban drag shows, prohibit gender-affirming care and limit how teachers can talk about sexuality and gender in the classroom.

It's rare these days for a turbaned cleric in Iran to attract a large following of adoring young fans on Instagram, but Sayed Mahdi Tabatabaei has done it by rescuing street dogs in defiance of a local taboo.

Tabatabaei posts regularly — to his more than 80,000 followers — heartbreaking stories of abused and neglected dogs that he has treated in his shelter. His young fans ask for updates on the rescues and send well wishes in the hundreds of comments he receives on almost every post.

Thousands of people are to march in Jerusalem's Pride parade on Thursday, an annual event that is taking place this year under Israel's most right-wing government ever, stacked with openly homophobic members.

The march in the conservative city is always tense and tightly secured by police, and has been wracked by violence in the past. But this year, Israel finds itself deeply riven over a contentious government plan to overhaul the judiciary. The plan has torn open longstanding societal divisions between those who want to preserve Israel's liberal values and those who seek to shift it toward more religious conservatism.

If time travel was possible, medieval carpenters would surely be amazed to see how woodworking techniques they pioneered in building Notre Dame Cathedral more than 800 years ago are being used again today to rebuild the world-famous monument's fire-ravaged roof.

Certainly the reverse is true for the modern-day carpenters using medieval-era skills. Working with hand axes to fashion hundreds of tons of oak beams for the framework of Notre Dame's new roof has, for them, been like rewinding time. It's given them a new appreciation of their predecessors' handiwork that pushed the architectural envelope back in the 13th century.

Jerusalem's iconic citadel has opened its revamped museum after a three-year, $50 million makeover that included a restoration of its signature minaret.

The Tower of David, the ancient fortress on the western edge of the Old City, contains remnants of successive fortifications built one atop the other dating back over two millennia. For centuries, pilgrims, conquerors and tourists visiting the city holy to Judaism, Christianity and Islam have entered Jerusalem beneath the adjacent Jaffa Gate.

For at least four years, thousands of children have been growing up in a camp in northeast Syria housing families of Islamic State group militants, raised in an atmosphere where the group's radical ideology still circulates and where they have almost no chance for an education.

Fearing that a new generation of militants will emerge from al-Hol Camp, the Kurdish officials who govern eastern and northern Syria are experimenting with a rehabilitation program aimed at pulling children out of extremist thought.

Two top rights groups on Friday slammed the severe restrictions imposed on women and girls by the Taliban in Afghanistan as gender-based persecution, which is a crime against humanity.

In a new report, Amnesty International and the International Commission for Jurists, or ICJ, underscored how the Taliban crackdown on Afghan women's rights, coupled with "imprisonment, enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment," could constitute gender persecution under the International Criminal Court.

Lebanon's gracious Sursock Museum is set to reopen on Friday, more than two years after a catastrophic explosion at Beirut port devastated the architectural gem and its modern and contemporary art collection.

Bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has won this year's Princess of Asturias Award for literature, the Spanish foundation that organizes the prizes said Wednesday.

The Princess of Asturias Award jury praised the "uniqueness" of the 72-year-old Kyoto-born writer's essays, short stories and novels, which have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold millions of copies.