Prominent Lebanese playwright Raymond Jebara passed away on Tuesday at the age of 80, following a battle with illness.

Jebara died at the Bhanness Medical Center in Metn.

The Lebanese Canadian Society of BC (WLCU-Vancouver chapter) in collaboration with the World Lebanese Cultural Union-BC Council will host a presentation on April 17, in Vancouver by Dr. Josyann Abisaab to mark the 103rd anniversary of the 125 Lebanese who lost their lives aboard the Titanic.

The RMS Titanic passenger liner sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, UK to New York City, U.S.

Germany's Nobel-winning author Gunther Grass said he feared humanity was "sleepwalking" into a world war in the last interview he gave before his death on Monday.

"We have on the one side Ukraine, whose situation is not improving; in Israel and Palestine things are getting worse; the disaster the Americans left in Iraq, the atrocities of Islamic state and the problem of Syria," he told the Spanish newspaper El Pais in the interview published Tuesday.

Michel Dancoisne-Martineau knows that the story of Napoleon's life in exile is timeless -- and irresistible.

The Frenchman is tasked with preserving the property where Napoleon Bonaparte lived after being exiled to the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena in 1815 and remained until his death six years later.

Trowels in hand, on their haunches, masons in Timbuktu use traditional techniques to reconstruct precious mausoleums destroyed in an Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012.

Al-Qaida-linked insurgents wrecked 16 of the fabled desert city's shrines to Muslim saints that date back to Timbuktu's 15th and 16th century golden age as an economic, intellectual and spiritual center. 

A jihadist fighter slits a man's throat, another brandishes a severed head spiked on his rifle while more militants dump bodies into a trench overflowing with corpses.

This is how painter Ammar Salim depicts the massacres the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group perpetrated against his Yazidi minority in northern Iraq last summer.

The U.N.'s cultural agency issued a fresh condemnation Monday of jihadists' destruction of Iraq's Nimrud, once the jewel of Assyria and home to a treasure considered one of the 20th century's main archaeological finds.

"I condemn this mad, destructive act that accentuates the horror of the situation," UNESCO head Irina Bokova said in a statement.

Germany's Nobel-winning author, Gunter Grass, who acted as a moral compass for many in the postwar nation but later provoked criticism over his own World War II past, died Monday aged 87, his publishers said.

The writer, one of Germany's most influential if controversial intellectual figures, died in a hospital in the northern city of Luebeck, the Steidl publishing house said.

Iran has suspended pilgrimages to the Muslim holy places in Saudi Arabia in protest at an alleged sexual assault attempt against two teenage Iranian boys, the culture minister said Monday.

According to Iranian media reports, two Saudi police are alleged to have attempted to assault the youngsters at Jeddah airport as they prepared to fly home from a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina two weeks ago.

Migrants of Circumstance- a continuous, open sharing platform of social, cultural, and academic knowledge exchange- is a live project inside Syrian refugee settlements in Lebanon, a press release said on Monday.

Studies show that only 20% of Syrian children are enrolled in school in Lebanon; in response, Goldsmiths Design student Daniel Nasr is developing a sustainable method of providing accessible education to both children and young adults in refugee communities who do not have access to traditional education, the release added.