In crowded subway cars and sun-drenched plazas, an old-fashioned accessory in Spain has been everywhere thanks to the blistering summer heat.

Small enough to fit into a purse, the traditional Spanish folding hand fan, or abanico, snaps open into a semicircle. With little more than a flick of the wrist, it creates a surprisingly strong breeze.

Eleven-year-old Fatima Khashab helps her mother tidy the small area where their family sleeps, in a row of makeshift living quarters in a school gymnasium.

About 200 families are sheltering in the school in Lebanon's southern coastal city of Tyre. Most are from villages farther south that have been destroyed in the latest war between Israel and Hezbollah or are occupied by Israeli forces, like Fatima's hometown of Mansouri.

From a Roman temple to ancient olive presses, Lebanon keeps turning up archaeological treasures even as the latest Israel-Hezbollah war has caused excavations to grind to a halt at precious heritage sites in the country's south.

When Kripa Vaidyanathan's 27-year-old niece died in an Alaska car crash in 2024, her family in Chennai, India, felt shell-shocked. They questioned why this tragedy would befall them when they had such "immense faith in God."

Vaidyanathan, a yoga instructor, helped her grieving sister get face time with a high-profile guru who she hoped would help.

The contradiction of the trim Parisian and the butter croissant now has a storefront.

Le Butter Shop, billed as Paris' first boutique devoted entirely to butter, opened last month a short walk from the Eiffel Tower — with 30 varieties from small family producers in Brittany, the Loire Valley and northern France.

The enormous doors were pushed shut, the clanking bolts secured from the outside and several clergy, pilgrims and one journalist — me — were locked for the night inside one of Christianity's holiest sites in Jerusalem.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was built over the spots where Christians believe Jesus was crucified, buried and rose from the dead.

Thousands of revelers descended on Buñol on Wednesday for the annual La Tomatina food fight, where they painted the small Spanish town red with up to 165 tons of overripe tomatoes.

Loaded trucks proceeded through the crowd, with people standing in their cargo beds hurling tomatoes at the revelers. Their white shirts soon turned pink and red while American pop songs blasted from speakers. At one point, police appeared to use pepper spray to disperse an area of the crowd, but a festive vibe quickly resumed.

The American University of Beirut (AUB) hosted the first Lebanese Mathematics Day, bringing together 341 participants from more than ten universities, high schools, industry, and the international mathematical community for a full day of talks, workshops, poster sessions, and discussion on the AUB campus.

AUB’s Center for Advanced Mathematical Sciences (CAMS), directed by Professor of Physics Jihad Touma, organized the event in collaboration with the university’s Department of Mathematics and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Read this quickly, before it melts.

Ice cream was a rare and expensive treat for centuries because of the difficulty of storing ice. In the summer of 1790, President George Washington spent $200 on ice cream, the equivalent of $7,259 today, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish families are an unmissable facet of Israeli life. Immediately recognizable, the men dress in black suits and hats, the women in modest long sleeves and skirts with wigs, turbans or scarves covering their hair, and numerous children tag along, often in matching outfits.

They are growing in numbers and in political and cultural clout. That's bringing their vision of faith, Jewish identity and civic practices into conflict with other Israelis, both religious and secular. Distrust spirals on all sides.