For the first time in its almost 500-year history, the Roman Catholic Jesuit order on Friday elected a non-European as its leader, a post informally known as the "black pope."

A Turkish official ripped a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed out of a mural at the Council of Europe headquarters in Strasbourg, a source at the rights body said Friday.

A group of Indian cinemas said Friday they would not screen any films featuring Pakistani artists in protest at an attack by militants that killed 19 Indian soldiers in Kashmir.

A Pakistani teenager and his religious teacher have been accused of blasphemy, police told AFP Friday, after the student was allegedly caught burning pages of the Koran.

Israel suspended cooperation with UNESCO on Friday after the UN cultural organisation adopted two resolutions on annexed east Jerusalem ahead of a final vote next week.

In a letter sent to UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova, Education Minister Naftali Bennett accused the body of ignoring "thousands of years of Jewish ties to Jerusalem" and aiding "Islamist terror."

More than 24 hours after awarding Bob Dylan the Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy said Friday they had still not managed to speak to the reclusive U.S. singer.

Long-banished German words and phrases linked to the country's Nazi past have been revived by far-right politicians railing against the migrant influx, sparking comparisons to the 1930s.

Huge crowds of black-clad Shiite Muslim pilgrims thronged the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala on Wednesday, weeping and beating their chests in mourning for the seventh century killing of the prophet's grandson.

Shiites in Iraq have come under frequent attack by Sunni extremists of the Islamic State group who regard them as heretics, and some 30,000 security personnel were out on the streets to guard the pilgrims, although attacks in Karbala are rare.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has filed an appeal to contest a decision by German authorities to drop a probe into a TV comic who satirized him, local officials said Monday.

The Council of Europe on Monday awarded its Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize to Iraqi activist Nadia Murad, who was an IS sex slave before becoming the face of a campaign to protect her Yazidi people.