VATICAN - Pope Francis has proclaimed a special jubilee pilgrimage for gays and all LGBTQ+ people, Italian media announced this weekend. For the first time, a specific Jubilee event will be dedicated to Catholic homosexuals and LGBT people, noted the Italian daily, Il Messaggero, despite the Catholic Church considering homosexual acts to be intrinsically disordered. On September 5, Catholic members of the LGBTQI+ community will be hosted by the Jesuit Church of the Gesù, in central Rome, for a vigil service. The Jubilee 2025 initiative is sponsored by Jonathan’s Tent, an Italian pro-LGBTQ organization founded in 2018 by Catholic priest Father David Esposito that aims to reconcile “homosexuality and faith.” The news was welcomed by other LGBT advocacy groups.

VATICAN - Pope Francis is preparing to unbrick and open five ‘sacred portals’ symbolising the doorway to salvation. The doors are only opened once every 25 years, so may well be a little rusty. This year, for the first time, one of the doors will be opened in a prison, as a ‘sign inviting prisoners to look to the future with hope’, the Pope said in his bull of induction announcing this year’s ceremony. The tradition dates back to 1300, and the door openings themselves follow a ritual first carried out in 1423. They mark ‘Jubilee’ years, a concept dating back to the Old Testament when sinners could see their sins forgiven. They will remain open all year for pilgrims to pass through until the Jubilee finishes on January 6, 2026. And they won’t be opened again until we go into 2050.

UK - Who’d be a teacher these days? There was a time when teaching was a most honourable profession: what could be more important than shaping and educating the minds of the future? But times have certainly changed since then: a new survey has revealed that one in seven teachers have faced allegations from pupils or their parents in the last year. And many of them have been “vexatious” according to Edapt, which carried out the poll, and can seriously damage careers.

MIDDLE EAST - With mind-boggling speed the 50 year-old Assad dictatorship in Syria has fallen. Damascus has been taken by the rebel jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), Bashar al Assad and his family have fled to Moscow, and his residences and palaces – and many of the banks – have been looted by joyous rioters.

USA - Parents limited their teenager’s phone time. An AI chatbot suggested he could kill them. Parents file lawsuit claiming Character.ai encouraged their son to turn against them and rebel against rules set on screen time. An AI chatbot encouraged an autistic teenager to self-harm and told him it supported children killing their parents, according to claims in a new lawsuit. The parents of an unidentified 17-year-old from Texas said personas created by the AI company Character.ai turned their son against them and “destroyed their family”.

USA - Former Secret Service agent Richard Staropoli warned Thursday that President-elect Donald Trump could soon face an attack that his former agency is unprepared to prevent. The president-elect faced two assassination attempts during the 2024 presidential campaign, including one where a 20-year-old named Thomas Matthew Crooks got within rifle range of Trump by climbing to the top of a building near his rally. Staropoli, on “America Reports,” suggested Trump could face a threat “of a much bigger magnitude” than Crooks before he takes office in January.

USA - US President-elect Donald Trump plans to issue more than 25 executive orders on his first day in office, “dramatically” reshaping a number of government policies, Reuters has said. Trump has told his aides he wants to make a “big splash” and act with greater scale and speed than in his first term, two anonymous sources told the agency. More orders will be issued in the following days and weeks, the sources said. “The American people can bank on President Trump using his executive power on day one to deliver on the promises he made to them on the campaign trail,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Reuters on Wednesday.

HUNGARY - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has claimed that his country’s refusal to conform to liberal ideology will yield considerable benefits in the future. The conservative nationalist politician has been in power since 2010, winning successive elections on a platform of defying what he considers to be authoritarian rule by Brussels. “The liberal world order is over,” he declared during a speech in Budapest on Tuesday. EU leaders have accused Orban of backsliding on democracy in Hungary and undermining the bloc’s attempts to project solidarity on the Ukraine conflict. Orban has argued that Brussels’ policies have been disastrous for EU member states.

SAUDI ARABIA - A tour throughout Western nations and a commitment to fight violence against women is what the prince of Saudi Arabia, whose kingdom now leads a UN commission, is trying to show the world. However, at the same time, at home, his nation broke the record for executions: over 300 so far in 2024. What’s more, the record was broken when it exceeded 300 and reached 304 individuals executed via capital punishment. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the last four people sentenced to the death penalty were three convicted of drug trafficking and another for murder. That is the highest number in the last 30 years and the last 100 were carried out in about a month. Although Saudi lives have equal value, what is most striking is that a third of those executed were foreigners: 100 people. This would show that Saudi Arabia does not fear the repercussions of other countries, as it takes the lives of their citizens.

UK - Economic changes and the movement to push back against total digital surveillance of daily life by using cash rather than cards to buy things appears to be having an impact, with cash transactions rising for the second year in a row, industry says. Debanking activist and Brexit leader Nigel Farage has long beat the ‘cash is king’ drum on the importance of not allowing digital transactions to totally dominate everyday life as a protection against banks being able to arbitrarily turn off the ability of individuals to make payments if, say, they have the wrong political views. The view that cash still has utility appears to be permeating, as the British Retail Consortium states cash use has just risen for the second year running, starting a slow fightback against decades of decline against cards.

AUSTRALIA - A new “religion” is rapidly becoming mainstream, with tens of thousands of Australians suddenly embracing the exploding trend. Dressed head-to-toe in black, Owlvine Green’s fingers hover over a steaming cauldron as a cat looks on, ominously. Candles flicker, casting eerie shadows on the wall. Incense smokes, and a spell book — filled with mystical, arcane symbols — is laid open in front of her. It’s a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in a Harry Potter film. But this isn’t a movie. This is an unassuming home in suburban Melbourne, and Owlvine is a real-life witch. “We’re everywhere — young and old, in the inner city and out in the middle of the bush,” the 36-year-old told news.com.au. “You could be sharing a desk with one of us, or living on the same street.” Today, tens of thousands of Australians identify as witches and globally, we’re in the midst of a bona fide witchcraft boom.

UKRAINE - Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has rejected a call by US President-elect Donald Trump for an immediate truce and peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. Following a meeting between Trump, Zelensky, and French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Saturday, the US president-elect issued a lengthy post on his Truth Social platform saying, “there should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin” to settle the Ukraine conflict. According to Trump, Ukraine “would like to make a deal and stop the madness.” However, Zelensky made it clear that this is not the case, in a post published on X on Sunday, in which he said the conflict “cannot simply end with a piece of paper and a few signatures.” Trump has repeatedly claimed that he could end the Ukraine conflict within a day of returning to the White House, and has criticized the outgoing US administration for spending too much on arming Kiev.

SYRIA - While radical Sunni militants were conquering Damascus, Israel was conducting an absolutely massive bombing campaign inside Syria that is unlike anything we have seen before. The IDF is telling us that more than 350 targets were hit. Basically the goal was to destroy as much military hardware as possible so that it would not fall into the hands of the militants. The Israelis were concerned that the militants might use the military hardware that they inherited against them, and so they took pre-emptive action. Unfortunately, the militants are now steaming mad, and some of them are already publicly threatening Israel. Syria never had a large navy to begin with, but now it has been completely neutralized.

ISRAEL - Warplanes have reportedly hit more than 250 military targets in the country. Israel has launched a large-scale attack on targets in Syria, with warplanes pounding at least three airports and other infrastructure following the demise of former President Bashar Assad’s government, according to several media reports. An unnamed Israeli security source told Israeli Army Radio that “more than 250 military targets were attacked in Syria,” describing the assault as “one of the largest attack operations in the history of… [the] air force.” The targets included “bases of Assad's army, dozens of fighter jets, dozens of surface-to-air missile systems, production sites and warehouses… and surface-to-surface missiles.”

MIDDLE EAST - For the moment, there is jubilation on the streets of Damascus, and rebels are having a grand time looting Assad’s presidential palace… Assad was an absolutely brutal leader, and he was deeply hated by large portions of the Syrian population. Obviously, Russia is one of the big losers in this saga. Syria was Russia’s closest ally in the Middle East. Now the Russians have been forced to pull all of their forces out of the country and will be losing their sole naval base on the Mediterranean Sea… Russia is evacuating its ships and transporting leftover weapons by air from its bases in Syria as the regime of Bashar al-Assad falls, according to the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine (DIU).