A mountain in New Zealand considered an ancestor by Indigenous people was recognized as a legal person on Thursday after a new law granted it all the rights and responsibilities of a human being.

Mount Taranaki — now known as Taranaki Maunga, its Māori name — is the latest natural feature to be granted personhood in New Zealand, which has ruled that a river and a stretch of sacred land are people before. The pristine, snow-capped dormant volcano is the second highest on New Zealand's North Island at 2,518 meters (8,261 feet) and a popular spot for tourism, hiking and snow sports.

During a signing ceremony Wednesday for the Laken Riley Act, President Donald Trump claimed that his administration had "identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas."

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, made a similar claim on Tuesday during her debut press briefing, stating that the Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Management and Budget "found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza." She called the alleged aid "a preposterous waste of taxpayer money." But there's no credible evidence to support these claims.

The White House stenographers have a problem. Donald Trump is talking so much, the people responsible for transcribing his public remarks are struggling to keep up with all the words.

There were more than 22,000 on Inauguration Day, then another 17,000 when Trump visited disaster sites in North Carolina and California. It's enough to strain the ears and fingers of even the most dedicated stenographer, especially after four years of Joe Biden's relative quiet.

Footage of a priest with a machinegun slung over his shoulder inside a church in Lebanon’s Mazraat Yachouh has gone viral on social media and stirred controversy in the country.

A cryptocurrency entrepreneur who bought a piece of conceptual art consisting of a simple banana, duct-taped to a wall, for $6.2 million last week ate the fruit in Hong Kong on Friday.

Chinese-born Justin Sun peeled off the duct tape and enjoyed the banana in a press conference held in The Peninsula Hong Kong, one of the city's priciest hotels, in the popular shopping district of Tsim Sha Tsui.

Ryan Wesley Routh portrayed himself online as a man who built housing for homeless people in Hawaii, tried to recruit fighters for Ukraine to defend itself against Russia, and described his support and then disdain for Donald Trump — even urging Iran to kill him.

"You are free to assassinate Trump," Routh wrote of Iran in an apparently self-published book in 2023, "Ukraine's Unwinnable War," which described the former president as a "fool" and "buffoon" for both the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and the "tremendous blunder" of leaving the Iran nuclear deal.

Donald Trump shared doctored images showing Taylor Swift and her fans supporting his presidential campaign, in an apparent effort to tap into the pop singer's mega star power in the U.S. election.

Swift has not yet publicly thrown her weight behind any presidential candidate in the November 5 election, but she backed President Joe Biden in 2020 and has previously been critical of Trump.

Italian researchers have noted the first case of "virgin birth", or reproduction without fertilization, in an endangered shark species, a scientific journal reported this week.

The findings published in Scientific Reports concern the first case of the phenomenon in the common smooth-hound shark, Mustelus mustelus, a species threatened by illegal fishing that inhabits the Mediterranean and other warm waters.

They were billed as artworks by Pablo Picasso, paintings so valuable that an Australian art museum's decision to display them in an exhibition restricted to women visitors provoked a gender discrimination lawsuit. The paintings again prompted international headlines when the gallery re-hung them in a women's restroom to sidestep a legal ruling that said men could not be barred from viewing them.

But the artworks at the center of the uproar were not really by Picasso or the other famed artists billed as their creators, it emerged this week when the curator of the women-only exhibition admitted she had painted them herself.

Police in the Maldives have arrested a state environment minister, officers said Thursday, with media in the Indian Ocean nation reporting she was accused of performing "black magic" on the president.

State Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Energy, Fathimath Shamnaz Ali Saleem, was arrested on Sunday along with two others in the capital Male, police said.