Nearly 7,000 Russian scientists, mathematicians and academics had as of Thursday signed an open letter addressed to President Vladimir Putin "strongly" protesting against his war in Ukraine.

By itself, being able to read smartphone home screens in Cherokee won't be enough to safeguard the Indigenous language, endangered after a long history of erasure. But it might be a step toward immersing younger tribal citizens in the language spoken by a dwindling number of their elders.

That's the hope of Principal Chief Richard Sneed of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who's counting on more inclusive consumer technology — and the involvement of a major tech company — to help out.

They file into neighboring countries by the hundreds of thousands — refugees from Ukraine clutching children in one arm, belongings in the other. And they're being heartily welcomed, by leaders of countries like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania.

But while the hospitality has been applauded, it has also highlighted stark differences in treatment given to migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa, particularly Syrians who came in 2015. Some of the language from these leaders has been disturbing to them, and deeply hurtful.

Dubai will open the doors Friday to an architecturally stunning building housing the new Museum of the Future, a seven-story structure that envisions a dreamlike world powered by solar energy and the Gulf Arab state's frenetic quest to develop.

The torus-shaped museum is a design marvel that forgoes support columns, relying instead on a network of diagonal beams. It is enveloped in windows carved by Arabic calligraphy, adding another eye-popping design element to Dubai's piercingly modern skyline that shimmers with the world's tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa.

In many countries, public libraries are considered a dying relic amid the shift to digital, but in Lebanon they are getting a new lease of life as its economy flatlines.

As South Korea enters a bitter presidential race, Hong Hee-jin is one of many young women who feel that the country's politics has become dominated by discrimination against women, even outright misogyny.

"Women are being treated like they don't even have voting rights," the 27-year-old office worker in the capital, Seoul, said.

A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists said that it had found a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine at a remote Neolithic site in Jordan's eastern desert.

The ritual complex was found in a Neolithic campsite near large structures known as "desert kites," or mass traps that are believed to have been used to corral wild gazelles for slaughter.

LGBTQ representation on scripted TV series has grown along with the footprint of streaming services, according to an annual study by the advocacy group GLAAD.

"TV is leading entertainment in telling LGBTQ stories," Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, said in the "Where We Are on TV" report on the 2021-22 season that was released.

Peter Paul Rubens' 17th century masterpiece "Portrait of a Lady" is set to go up for auction in Poland next month, the DESA Unicum auction house said.

The Flemish master's oil-on-canvas portrait of a dark-haired woman in a rich black velvet dress has an estimated value of 18 million to 24 million zlotys ($4.5 million- $6 million).

The Biden administration on Friday released a screening tool to help identify disadvantaged communities long plagued by environmental hazards, but it won't include race as a factor in deciding where to devote resources.

Administration officials told reporters that excluding race will make projects less likely to draw legal challenges and will be easier to defend, even as they acknowledged that race has been a major factor in terms of who experiences environmental injustice.