Pope Francis welcomed in UAE as rights groups up the pressure

The head of the Roman Catholic Church is "better than before," a doctor said, after he underwent a hernia operation.

Saudi Arabia is seeking to increase its influence in the Emirates-backed port city of Aden. Behind this move, observers see the beginning of an exit strategy from the brutal and costly war in Yemen.

The UN says it has begun an operation to pump 1 million barrels of oil from a rusting supertanker off Yemen's coast, hoping to avoid an environmental disaster that could devastate local ecosystems and major ports.

The UN said over 1 million barrels of oil have been removed from the tanker, off Yemen's Red Sea coast. For years, the UN and other organizations had sounded the alarm over the dangers surrounding the corroding vessel.

Comments Pope Francis made during a private discussion on a recent trip to Portugal criticizing the US Catholic Church, home to several of his more staunch opponents, have been made public in Italy.

With just over 1,400 Catholics, Mongolia is one of the smallest and newest Catholic communities in the world. Pope Francis makes the trip while also casting an eye toward China.

Pope Francis is on the first-ever papal visit to the country on China and Russia's doorstep, where he said governments shouldn't fear the Church's work.

After a mass in Mongolia attended by some groups of Chinese Catholics, the pope told them to be "good Christians and good citizens."

At the end of his historic trip to the Buddhist nation, Pope Francis said the Catholic church is driven by faith to help the needy, and not as a way of attracting new converts.

It's sometimes called a forgotten war: fighting in Yemen has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Hunger has claimed even more lives, while 4.5 million Yemenis are internally displaced. Yet the complex conflict between Saudi-led forces and Houthi rebels doesn't always make headlines. This September, nine years after the Houthis attacked the capital Sanaa, triggering Saudi Arabia's intervention, the country is not in the grips of all-out war, but it's still not at peace either.

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The five-day negotiations in Riyadh marked the latest hopeful sign since Yemen's devastating war began in 2014.