Rights activists have condemned a hardline Christian group's assault on a bar hosting a drag show in a Beirut nightlife district as the result of escalating anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

On Wednesday evening, more than a dozen people from the "Soldiers of God" group converged on the drag show venue in the capital's Mar Mikhail district, witnesses told AFP, requesting anonymity due to security concerns.

Members of the hardline Christian group Soldiers of God overnight attacked a pub in Beirut’s bustling Mar Mikhail area over the “presence of homosexuals” in it.

Videos posted online showed the pub’s ransacked terrace and people locking themselves inside as a Soldier of God militant shouted threats and warnings.

A new study on inclusion in film shows just how much of a rarity "Barbie" is. For every woman as a speaking character in the most popular films of 2022, there were more than two men, according to report by University of Southern California's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.

The USC report, published Thursday, found that 34.6% of speaking parts were female in the top 100 box-office hits of last year. The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has been annually tracking that and many other metrics since 2007.

After Bradley Cooper's prosthetic nose in the trailer for the upcoming Leonard Bernstein biopic "Maestro" stoked criticism of antisemitism, the conductor's children have come to the defense of the actor.

The teaser trailer for "Maestro," which Cooper directs and stars in, debuted Tuesday and offered the first close-up look at Cooper's makeup and performance as the great American composer and longtime music director of the New York Philharmonic. Cooper, who is not Jewish, dons a prosthetic nose as part of his transformation into Bernstein, who was.

Police have arrested 129 Muslims after a mob angered by an alleged Quran desecration attacked a dozen churches and nearly two dozen homes of minority Christians, officials said. Police also arrested two Christian men accused of defacing Islam's holy book.

The alleged desecration set off a violent rampage Wednesday in Jaranwala, causing Christians to flee to safer places in the eastern city as the mob inflicted one of the country's most destructive attacks on Christians.

Men and women will use the same tennis ball this year at the U.S. Open, satisfying some women who complained last year they were hitting an inferior product.

Top-ranked Iga Swiatek — who eventually won the tournament — was among the women who felt their lighter ball didn't hold its strength as long as the one that was used by men. The U.S. Open had been the only one of the four Grand Slam tournaments that used a different ball for men and women.

Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has said that Hezbollah and other "terrorist groups" have urged their sympathizers to take revenge for the Quran burnings that have taken place in Sweden.

He said that Swedish interests abroad had already been targeted, including an attempted attack on the diplomatic mission in Beirut last week and the storming of Sweden's Embassy in Baghdad last month.

Nestled in sand dunes an hour's drive from the skyscrapers of Dubai, a desert village abandoned in the 1990s stands as an eerie relic of the rapid urbanization of the United Arab Emirates.

Built in the 1970s to house semi-nomadic Bedouin, the village of al-Ghuraifa was abandoned two decades later as oil wealth transformed the country into a global hub of commerce and tourism, home to the futuristic cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

A senior Swedish official said Monday Swedes abroad and businesses linked to Sweden"should observe increased vigilance and caution," following recent Quran burnings in the country and protests in the Muslim world.

Henrik Landerholm, Sweden's National Security Adviser, said there are signs of "a heightened threat" to the country and to Swedish interests abroad, adding the security situation has worsened.

For a vast number of book writers, artificial intelligence is a threat to their livelihood and the very idea of creativity. More than 10,000 of them endorsed an open letter from the Authors Guild this summer, urging AI companies not to use copyrighted work without permission or compensation.

At the same time, AI is a story to tell, and no longer just in science fiction.