Two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, its leader Mikhail Gorbachev would receive an unusual letter from the Islamic republic of Iran's founder, inviting him to embrace Islam.

The last leader of the USSR passed away in Moscow on Tuesday at the age of 91, leaving behind a legacy that polarized observers on either side of the Iron Curtain.

Israeli archaeologists recently unearthed the titanic tusk of a prehistoric pachyderm near a kibbutz in southern Israel, a remnant of a behemoth once hunted by early people around half a million years ago.

The Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday that the 2.5-meter (yard) long fossil belonging to the long-extinct straight-tusked elephant was found during a joint excavation with researchers from Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University.

An American court has thrown out a lawsuit against a German museum foundation over a medieval treasure trove that was filed by heirs of Nazi-era Jewish art dealers, saying that the U.S. lacked jurisdiction to hear such a lawsuit.

The foundation that oversees Berlin's museums said in a statement Tuesday that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last week granted the foundation's motion to dismiss the 2015 restitution lawsuit that was brought against it, bringing the case to an end in the U.S., absent an appeal by the plaintiff.

Workers caked in plaster are putting the finishing touches to storeys-high statues of the elephant god Ganesha in time for one of India's biggest religious festivals, now jumbo-sized again after Covid.

The 11-day Ganesh Chaturthi festival, which draws tens of thousands of Hindu devotees onto streets across the seaside megacity of Mumbai, begins on Wednesday.

From card games to horse rides, women in Gaza are spending their summer nights outdoors to seek solace from daily hardships in the Palestinian enclave.

Anticipation for one of the fall's likeliest bestsellers has been growing all year.

For months, Colleen Hoover's millions of fans on TikTok, Instagram and elsewhere have been talking up and posting early excerpts from her novel "It Starts With Us." By summer, the author's sequel to her bestselling "It Ends With Us" had already reached the top 10 Amazon.com. It might have climbed higher but for competition from other Hoover novels, including "Ugly Love," "Verity" and, of course, "It Ends With Us," the dramatic tale of a love triangle and a woman's endurance of domestic abuse that young TikTok users have embraced and helped make Hoover the country's most popular fiction writer.

Eight ancient glass vessels shattered in the 2020 Beirut explosion go on display at the British Museum from Thursday, walking visitors through the painstaking international project to piece them back together.

The vessels, from the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods, were reconstructed at the world-famous museum's conservation laboratories, and will be shown as part of its "Shattered Glass of Beirut" showcase, before returning to Lebanon later this year.

Dog shelters in Cyprus are overflowing in what some volunteers are calling a crisis caused by the abandonment of canines adopted during Covid as well as complications arising from Brexit.

In celebration of its fifth anniversary, the Global Health Institute (GHI) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) has organized the Global Health Change Makers” pitch competition. The event brought together students from universities of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to present their project ideas related to Global Health and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through a 5-minute pitch for a chance to win seed funding.

Seven competitors coming from different countries in MENA including Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and others were shortlisted to the final stage and participated in the competition that was held at AUB, the university said in a statement.

Friends and fellow authors spoke out on Salman Rushdie's behalf during a rally on the steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library, one week after he was attacked onstage in the western part of the state and hospitalized with stab wounds.

Rushdie's condition has improved, and, according to his literary agent, he has been removed from a ventilator.