Today is Friday, June 23, the 174th day of 2023. There are 191 days left in the year.

The hajj – the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which Muslims are expected to make once in their lives if they are able – is expected to begin June 26 and last for five days. In 2023, approximately 2 million pilgrims will participate, close to the annual numbers of pilgrims in years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Their visits, like those in generations past, will be enhanced, and even made possible, by modern technology.

A year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, some of the Republican Party's most powerful evangelical Christian voices are gathering to celebrate a ruling that sent shockwaves through American politics and stripped away a constitutional protection that stood for almost a half century.

At the Faith & Freedom Coalition's annual conference in Washington, GOP presidential candidates will be urged to keep pushing for stronger abortion restrictions, even as Democrats insist the issue will buoy them ahead of the 2024 election.

Saudi Arabia is hosting its biggest Hajj pilgrimage in three years, starting Monday. But for many pilgrims, and for many others who couldn't make it, global inflation and economic crises made it more of a strain to carry out Islam's spiritual trip of a lifetime.

Mohammed, a university professor in the Egyptian capital Cairo, said it was an annual tradition for him to apply to go on Hajj. But not this time.

It is Islam's holiest pilgrimage, but the hajj to Mecca in Saudi Arabia has in recent decades been plagued by deadly disasters, from stampedes to militant attacks.

Yet the last time the pilgrimage was cancelled outright was in 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt.

Enormous crowds of worshippers thronged Mecca, Islam's holiest city, on Friday for the biggest hajj pilgrimage in years, with more than two million expected to brave the scorching Saudi Arabian heat.

Pope Francis said Thursday he was short of breath and still feeling the effects of anesthesia from abdominal surgery two weeks ago.

Francis made the comments to explain why he chose not to deliver a prepared speech to visiting charity workers for Eastern rite churches. Instead, the speech was handed out.

Saudi Arabia has ambitious plans to welcome millions more pilgrims to Islam's holiest sites. But as climate change heats up an already scorching region, the annual Hajj pilgrimage — much of which takes place outdoors in the desert — could prove even more daunting.

The increased number of pilgrims, with the associated surge in international air travel and infrastructure expansion, also raises sustainability concerns, even as the oil giant pursues the goal of getting half its energy from renewable resources by 2030.

All hail the rising sun.

Around 8,000 revellers gathered around a prehistoric stone circle on a plain in southern England to express their devotion to the sun, or to have some communal fun.

Paying tribute at a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi joined a crowd of diplomats and dignitaries for a morning yoga session Wednesday at the United Nations, kicking off the public portion of his U.S. visit by calmly flexing India's cultural reach.

With a checkerboard of made-in-India yoga mats covering the U.N. headquarters' spacious north lawn, Modi stopped and bowed at a statue of the assassinated Indian independence leader. Then Modi took a seat on the rostrum as a cloud-filtered sun glinted off the adjacent East River and the flags of the world body's member nations rippled in the breeze.