Pope Benedict XVI will leave behind a Catholic Church grappling with crises from child abuse scandals involving priests to confronting radical Islam as well as struggling to find its place in an increasingly secular Western world.
German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who will step down at the end of this month after an eight-year pontificate, was elected pope on April 19, 2005 at a time when anger at clerical abuse was at its height in parts of Europe and North America, shaking the faith of many ordinary Catholics.

The Islamist movement Hamas which rules Gaza has set up its own news agency, called Al Rai (Opinion), the Palestinian territory's Hamas government announced on Monday.
"The first official news agency of the (Hamas) government has been established under the name of Al-Rai agency...under the supervision of the government information office," the office's director Salameh Maaruf told Agence France Presse.

The Pakistani Taliban have warned shopkeepers in a popular market to stop selling "obscene films" and Viagra-style male potency pills.
Shopkeepers told Agence France Presse Monday that they found handwritten pamphlets containing the warnings after opening Saturday in Karkhano market on the edge of the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Founded to care for victims of war, the International Committee of the Red Cross has faced a tough task, sometimes been found wanting, but has always known how to adapt to shifting challenges.
The Swiss-based ICRC marks its 150th anniversary on February 17, making it the world's oldest humanitarian organisation still in existence.

As Indonesia and other countries with Chinese diasporas welcome the Year of the Snake, some Islamic leaders have ignited a religious row by declaring the celebrations "haram" and off limits for Muslims.
After decades of repression under the dictatorship of Suharto, who rose to power after a bloody purge of communists and Chinese in the late 1960s, Chinese-Indonesians are now accepted in mainstream society of the largely Muslim nation.

"Not a day goes by without tombs being vandalized," says Dalmasso Bruno, caretaker of the Italian cemetery in the Libyan capital where Christians fear rising Muslim extremism.
"Human bones have been taken out of their tomb and scattered across the cemetery" in central Tripoli, he said. "The Libyan authorities came and took pictures. They promised to take measures but nothing has been done."

Tens of millions of Hindu pilgrims prepared to cleanse their sins with a plunge into the sacred river Ganges, ahead of the most auspicious day of the world's largest religious festival.
Some 30 million Hindu saints, devotees and visitors were expected to take part in the Kumbh Mela on Sunday -- considered the holiest of the 55-day festival -- in north India, police said.

Teenagers in blue-and-white uniforms pour out of classrooms of this boarding school at the edge of Haiti's capital, chattering in their native language of Creole about the science test they have just taken.
"Eske ou te byen konpoze?" asks one boy in the campus courtyard. In English, it translates as "How do you think you did?"

The leader of a breakaway Amish group who ordered his followers to chop off his rivals' beards was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Friday after being convicted of hate crimes.
Fifteen others convicted in the attacks, including three of ringleader Samuel Mullet's brothers and six women, were given lesser sentences of between one and seven years in prison.

When a middle-aged South African engineer recently set out to write a novel in his native Zulu, he found himself hamstrung by a lack of words to describe modern life.
Determined not to use English as a crutch, Phiwayinkosi Mbuyazi instead created 450 new words in Zulu, the mother tongue of a quarter of South Africa's 50 million population.
