Speaking ill of other people and spreading gossip is worse than Covid-19 and Satan is the worst offender of all, Pope Francis said Sunday.

A U.S. university has launched an investigation after a professor admitted she had lied for years about being black and is in fact white -- a stunning admission amid a tense national reckoning on race issues including cultural appropriation.

At the age of 93 and nearly five months, Benedict XVI officially became the oldest pope in history on Friday, even if the record is complicated by the fact that he stepped down in 2013 and holds the status of "pope emeritus". 

Egypt's highest Muslim authority Al-Azhar on Wednesday condemned French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo's decision to reprint cartoons of Prophet Mohammed, as the trial opened over the subsequent 2015 terror attack on its Paris office.

Turkey on Wednesday denounced the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo's decision to reprint cartoons of the prophet Mohammed and condemned French President Emmanuel Macron's "unacceptable" declaration of support.

Fourteen suspected accomplices of the jihadist gunmen who attacked the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket appeared in a Paris court Wednesday, five years after the three days of terror that rocked France.

Three years after the #MeToo movement spread globally, Iranian women have broken their silence on sexual violence, raising awareness about a subject that's taboo in the Islamic republic.

A veteran advocate of the arts and Lebanon's cultural heritage, Yvonne Sursock Cochrane died Monday aged 98, four weeks after the devastating Beirut blast in which she was injured.

Born into a wealthy Greek Orthodox family -- famed for their Sursock Museum -- and married to an Irish nobleman, Lady Cochrane died on the eve of the centenary of Lebanon, friends and family said on Facebook.

A century ago France created Greater Lebanon, the foundation for the modern-day state of Lebanon which is now mired in a deep political and economic crisis.

Mourning the Beirut blast disaster, ruined by economic meltdown and hostage to a dysfunctional political system, Lebanon marks its centenary Tuesday unsure whether it will survive as a state.

There will be no ceremony to commemorate 100 years since French mandate authorities on September 1, 1920 proclaimed the creation of Greater Lebanon incorporating mainly Muslim former Ottoman regions.