Finland is named the happiest country in the world for the eighth year in a row, according to the World Happiness Report 2025 published Thursday.

Other Nordic countries are also once again at the top of the happiness rankings in the annual report published by the Wellbeing Research Center at the University of Oxford. Besides Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden remain the top four and in the same order.

An unprecedented exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris explores the presence and influence of Black artists in the city from the 1950s to 2000, offering a vibrant immersion in France's cosmopolitan capital and a history of anti-colonial, civil rights struggles.

The "Black Paris" exhibition features the works of about 150 major artists of African descent, many of whom have never or rarely been displayed in France before. Running from March 19 to June 30, it's one of the final shows before the museum closes for a five-year renovation later this year.

King Charles III is scheduled to have an audience with Pope Francis during a state visit next month to the Vatican, suggesting the Holy See is optimistic the pontiff will be back at work by then, barring any setbacks in his recovery from double pneumonia.

The tentative audience was among details of the British monarch's visit to the Vatican and Italy released on Tuesday by Buckingham Palace. State visits are always planned in close consultation with the Vatican's secretariat of state.

How's Pope Francis doing? Can you give him my get-well wishes? Can I speak with him directly?

The nuns who operate the Vatican's switchboard are fielding a growing number of calls with questions like that as the pope remains hospitalized in Rome.

Dozens of clerics and others from Syria's minority Druze community crossed into the Israeli-controlled side of the Golan Heights Friday for the first time in decades.

The nearly 100 Syrian Druze crossed the heavily-fortified border area in three buses, escorted by members of the Israeli military. They are expected to visit a religious shrine on the Israeli side of the border.

Pope Francis marked the 12th anniversary of his papacy Thursday with increasingly positive medical updates four weeks into his hospitalization for double pneumonia.

The pope spent another tranquil night, the Vatican said in its brief morning statement.

A delegation of Syrian Druze clerics is planning to visit a pilgrimage site in Israel on Friday for the first time since Israel's creation in 1948, a source close to the group said.

"A delegation of dozens of Druze clerics will visit Israel on Friday," the source said, adding that it follows an invitation from the Druze community in Israel.

Pope Francis followed the Vatican's weeklong spiritual retreat via videoconference on Monday as he continued his recovery from double pneumonia and looked ahead to the 12th anniversary of his election amid questions about what the future of his papacy might look like.

As he did on Sunday, Francis participated in the retreat remotely from the Rome hospital where he is being treated. He could see and hear the Rev. Roberto Pasolini, preacher of the papal household, but the priests, bishops and cardinals gathered for the retreat in the Vatican auditorium could not see or hear him.

The aristocrats of the Habsburg royal court who danced in the first of Vienna 's famed balls in the 18th century could never have imagined how the hallmark of the Austrian capital's social and cultural scene would evolve.

Today, teenagers learn to waltz by watching YouTube videos while ladies shed their elbow-length gloves to better swipe on smartphones.

American Jews who fled their Syrian homeland decades ago went to the White House this week to appeal to the Trump administration to lift sanctions on Syria that they say are blocking them from restoring some of the world's oldest synagogues and rebuilding the country's decimated Jewish community.

For Henry Hamra, who fled Damascus as a teenager with his family in the 1990s, the 30 years since have been shadowed by worry for what they left behind.