In Meskel celebrations held under World Health Organization COVID-19 safety protocols, Abune Mathias, Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, called for dialogue, peace and reconciliation in the country, where ethnic tensions recently flared up.

At the Meskel Square - a ground in the capital, Addis Ababa named after the festival and

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RNS

Gospel singing star CeCe Winans said the planned public service announcement in which she discussed the coronavirus pandemic with the US surgeon general was “not political” and did not mention President Donald Trump.

The singer, who co-pastors a Nashville, Tennessee, church with her husband, told Rev AR

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Dakar, Senegal
Thomson Reuters Foundation

Vetting aid workers more closely and giving women more power is critical to tackle sex abuse in humanitarian crises as exposed in a joint investigation by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian, aid experts said on Wednesday.

In the expose, 51

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London, UK
Thomson Reuters Foundation

Britons would be happy to pay higher taxes for a fairer, more caring and gender-equal society as the coronavirus pandemic transforms people's views about the world they want to live in, economists said on Wednesday.

In a major report to be presented to

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New York, US/Geneva, Switzerland
Reuters

UN chief Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday it is time for countries to start using money from their national COVID-19 response to help fund a global vaccine plan as the World Bank warned that "broad, rapid and affordable access" to those doses will

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RNS

Kyle Meyaard-Schaap didn’t even make it to the climate change section of the first presidential debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Despite running Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, an environmental advocacy group, Meyaard-Schaap only managed to watch about 30 minutes before he

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RNS

Sister Ardeth Platte, a Dominican order nun who fought for nuclear disarmament and later served as an inspiration for a character on the popular Netflix show Orange Is the New Black , died in her sleep at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, DC, on Wednesday.

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Rome, Italy
AP

Cardinal George Pell, who left the Vatican in 2017 to face child sexual abuse charges in Australia, returned to Rome on Wednesday to find a Holy See mired in the type of corruption scandal he worked to expose and clean up. 

The 79-year-old Pell arrived

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AP

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey has apologised to a survivor of a racist 1963 church bombing that killed four Black girls, calling the blast an “egregious injustice", but declining Wednesday to pay restitution without legislative involvement.

Ivey, responding to a request submitted by an attorney for Sarah Collins

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Rome, Italy
AP

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the Vatican on Wednesday to join the US in denouncing violations of religious freedom in China, saying the Catholic Church should be at the forefront in the fight to insist on basic human rights there.

Pompeo made the

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RNS

LifeWay Christian Resources, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, has sued its former president and CEO, accusing him of violating a noncompete clause in his contract.  

Thom Rainer, who announced his plan to retire as president and CEO in 2018, still serves as chief advisory

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Falls Church, Virginia
AP

In a state where Confederate monuments have stood for more than a century and have recently become a flashpoint in the national debate over racial injustice, Virginians remain about evenly divided on whether the statues should stay or go, according to a new poll.

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