Latest society news, social issues, education, family affairs, public initiatives, community developments, and expert analysis from the Arab World and beyond. Follow comprehensive coverage of the social trends and challenges shaping communities and everyday life.
The quickest way to make being online safer for children and teens would be to kick all adult men off the internet, the Canadian psychologist Candice Odgers believes. Men are the biggest perpetrators of sextortion and most likely to spread misinformation, she says. Odgers is not recommending this as a policy for governments to adopt:…
(RNS) — A controversial Tennessee pastor has claimed federal officials broke down his door and raided his house after former members of his church accused him of financial impropriety. The Rev. Greg Locke, pastor of Global Vision Bible Church in Lebanon, Tennessee, said he was lying in bed about three weeks ago and heard a…
Iran has threatened to block further trading routes in the region, as the US launched a new strikes on military targets. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said the Strait of Hormuz would remain shut until the US ended its “acts of aggression”. It also threatened to close off other regional oil and gas export…
A Chicago priest known for his longtime social justice ministry has been placed on leave, following an abuse allegation for an incident said to have taken place some three decades ago. In a July 11 letter, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago informed the archdiocese’s Faith Community of St. Sabina that senior pastor Fr. Michael Pfleger had been…
I was 13 when a spinal surgeon gave me unsolicited career advice. “Scoliosis won’t ruin your life,” he said, peering over his spectacles, “unless you want to do bikini modelling.” As a young teenager, I hadn’t thought much about job prospects, let alone modelling, but his words stung. It also curdled my situation into a…
Last night, far from the thunder of this escalation, its parliament quietly introduced a new bill to manage the strait called the Strategic Action for the Security and Sustainable Progress of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. That news was posted on X by Ebrahim Azizi, head of the assembly’s national security commission,…
It is a rare thing—rare almost to the point of unheard-of—for the Holy See’s own news service to issue a public correction aimed, however obliquely, at the ambassador of a friendly power. Yet that is what happened on Monday, when Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication, published a reflection under the deceptively gentle…
As African bishops continue to back Pope Leo XIV over the excommunication of the Society of St. Pius X, known as SSPX, the traditionalist group in Kenya rejected the schismatic tag as it moved to assure followers of its Roman Catholic identity. Fr. Pierre Champroux, the priest in charge of the SSPX’s Holy Cross Parish in Nairobi, claimed in…
Morocco continues to take new steps in recognizing and valorizing its cultural diversity. The recent appearance of Tifinagh, the official alphabet of the Amazigh language, on the new Moroccan biometric passport is a striking illustration of this. From now on, the information on this official document is written in Arabic, French, and Amazigh, bearing witness…
High summer has returned to the UK, and with it, the usual warnings about the dangers of sunlight and reminders to seek shade and cover up. After years of such advice, most members of the public naturally assume that the science connecting sun exposure to poor health is well established, so people are often shocked…
