Pope Francis traveled to the Italian town of Assisi on Thursday for a private visit to mark the 800th anniversary of the 'Pardon of Assisi', under which the slates of sinners can be wiped clean.

Plans for a waterpark in Marseille to set aside a day just for Muslim women wearing burqinis -- full-body swimsuits -- sparked outrage in secular France on Thursday.

Researchers used super-X-ray vision to peer beneath the surface of a portrait by impressionist Edgar Degas and gaze upon the model whose likeness he painted over nearly 140 years ago, they reported Thursday.

Wartime diaries kept by top Nazi henchman Heinrich Himmler, serialized this week in Germany's daily Bild, offer chilling insights into the life of one of the principal architects of the Holocaust.

Special forces will be deployed in Amsterdam on Saturday when hundreds of thousands are expected to flock to the annual Gay Pride parade along its famous canals, police said.

Nobel prize-winning Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail, who served as a science and technology adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, died Tuesday in the United States. He was 70.

Zewail, a naturalized U.S. citizen, won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1999 for his groundbreaking work in the study of chemical reactions in extremely short timescales.

Young people today are not having as much sex as previous generations, despite the widespread availability of dating sites and apps and more accepting attitudes about premarital sex, researchers said Tuesday.

The study focused on millennials, the generation of people born in the 1990s, and found they were the most sexually inactive group since the Depression era.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in Israel will have access to state funds without having to teach core subjects such as maths, as parliament on Tuesday reversed proposed reforms.

Paris city workers on Tuesday set to scrubbing a monumental bronze statue which has become a battered rallying point for France's secular republic after a string of terror attacks.

Pope Francis on Tuesday appointed a special commission to examine the role of female deacons in the Church, in a potentially historic opening on the possibility of women joining the clergy.