Pope Francis celebrated Mass in St Peter’s Basilica in front of more than 1,000 prison inmates yesterday, in one of the final events of the Jubilee of Mercy, an 11-month Catholic festival that wraps up in two weeks.

Michelle is only seven years old but her poise is as disarming as her smile, which shows off a few gaps where baby teeth have fallen out when she beams about the headlines her book is grabbing at home and abroad.

An MP described her anxiety as her baby became one of thousands in London hit by an NHS shortage of the vaccine against tuberculosis.

Prime Minister Theresa May yesterday warned lawmakers not to block Brexit, after the High Court ruled that she cannot start the process of leaving the European Union without parliament’s approval.

A little over a decade ago, indigenous activist Joan Carling from the Philippines Cordillera region lost three colleagues in the space of a few years – all murdered in one of the world’s deadliest countries for land rights defenders.

A majority of Supreme Court (SC) justices are poised to reject the petitions seeking to stop the burial of the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (LNMB), court sources told Manila Times.

In the midst of Panama and the Bahamas leaks politics the government has decided to explore possibilities of joining international conventions of transparency and openness in governance. To this end Finance Minister Ishaq Dar convened a meeting yesterday.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has accused rebels within his centre-left party of using a forthcoming referendum on constitutional reform to try to oust him from office and seize back power for themselves.

Venezuela is going through a “very ugly” situation and there could be bloodshed ahead if talks between the government and opposition fail, a papal envoy told an Argentine newspaper after his visit to Venezuela this week.

Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CSU) has agreed to focus on common interests with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) ahead of national polls next year, edging away from differences over immigration that have divided the sister parties.

Police dragged away the mother of a Jawaharlal Nehru University student missing for 23 days and around 300 JNU students as they staged noisy protests here yesterday. The mother was later let off.

Schools in the Indian capital will be closed for the next three days, the Delhi state government said yesterday, as the city struggles with one of the worst spells of air pollution in recent years.