The famous wind-powered beach beasts have scuttled along the Dutch North Sea coast, into a swanky Miami art show and even onto "The Simpsons."

Now. they have a final resting place in a Dutch city most famous for "Girl with a Pearl Earring" painter Johannes Vermeer and blue-painted pottery.

Pope Leo XIV made his first appointment of a Chinese bishop under the Vatican's 2018 agreement with Beijing, signalling he is continuing one of Pope Francis' most controversial foreign policy decisions.

The Vatican expressed satisfaction that Leo's June 5 nomination of Bishop Joseph Lin Yuntuan as auxiliary bishop of Fuzhou was recognized Wednesday by Chinese authorities.

The heartland Brazilian city of Pirenópolis is hosting its annual Cavalhadas festival, a Holy Spirit celebration where participants ride horses, wear masks and don floral headpieces.

The tradition began in the 1800s with a Portuguese priest who wanted to celebrate the Holy Spirit — one of the entities of the Roman Catholic Church's trinity — and also commemorate the victory of Iberian Christian knights over the Moors.

Hundreds of thousands of Catholic pilgrims slogged for days under a punishing sun through country roads, sandy paths, even a river ford to reach the tiny hamlet of El Rocío in southern Spain for Pentecost weekend.

An icon of the Virgin Mary — La Virgen del Rocío — has been venerated in this remote area since the Middle Ages.

Tens of thousands of Muslim pilgrims clambered up rocks and nestled between boulders on Thursday as they embarked on a day of worship under a scorching sun at the Hajj in Saudi Arabia.

Braving the heat and uneven surfaces, they scaled Mount Arafat to perform a key ritual of the annual Islamic pilgrimage.

As I prepared to take a photograph of an anti-American mural outside of the former U.S. Embassy in Iran's capital recently, a passerby called out to me.

"Take any picture you like, they'll remove all of them later," the man said.

More than 1.5 million foreign pilgrims are in Saudi Arabia for this year's Hajj, a government spokesperson said Wednesday.

Hajj is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, a religious obligation involving rituals and acts of worship that every Muslim must fulfil if they have the money and are physically able to do it.

In April, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited a company that makes humanoid robots. There he floated an idea to fix the country's woeful men's football team.

"Can we have robots join the team?" Xi was quoted as saying on the website of Zhiyuan Robotics.

On this small island in rural Nagasaki, Japan's Hidden Christians gather to worship what they call the Closet God.

In a special room about the size of a tatami mat is a scroll painting of a kimono-clad Asian woman. She looks like a Buddhist Bodhisattva holding a baby, but for the faithful, this is a concealed version of Mary and the baby Jesus. Another scroll shows a man wearing a kimono covered with camellias, an allusion to John the Baptist's beheading and martyrdom.

Muslims from around the world are in the Saudi city of Mecca for the Hajj, one of the Five Pillars of Islam.

In the coming days, people will immerse themselves in religious rituals and acts of worship that originated more than 1,400 years ago.