(PARIS) — The United States and Israel officially quit the U.N.’s educational, scientific and cultural agency at the stroke of midnight, the culmination of a process triggered more than a year ago amid concerns that the organization fosters anti-Israel bias.

The withdrawal is mainly procedural yet serves a new blow to UNESCO, co-founded by the U.S. after World War II to foster peace.

The Trump administration filed its notice to withdraw in October 2017 and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed suit.

The Paris-based organization has been denounced by its critics as a crucible for anti-Israel bias: blasted for criticizing Israel’s occupation of east Jerusalem, naming ancient Jewish sites as Palestinian heritage sites and granting full membership to Palestine in 2011.

Israeli U.N. envoy Danny Danon said Tuesday that his country “will not be a member of an organization whose goal is to deliberately act against us, and that has become a tool manipulated by Israel’s enemies…

In the midst of an ongoing battle over women’s right to visit an important Hindu temple, women in the southern Indian state of Kerala lined up to form a 620km (385-mile) human chain in a mass demonstration for gender equality on Tuesday, reported the BBC.

The protest comes during a fraught period for religious and gender rights in Kerala. In September, India’s highest court overturned a historical ban on women of “menstruating age,” defined to be between ages 10 and 50, from entering the state’s Sabarimala shrine. Protesters have attacked women who attempting to visit the temple.

Tuesday’s rally was organized by Kerala’s left-leaning government, with approximately five million women from across the state taking part in the “women’s wall,” officials told the BBC.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) said on Monday that women’s issues were “part of the party’s class struggle,” reported the Indian Express. He went on to say that the women’s w..

New details have emerged about Paul Whelan, the 48-year-old Novi, Michigan, resident who is facing 10 to 20 years in Russian prison on charges of espionage.

While U.S. court records and the accounts of Whelan’s family and workplace cannot clear him from any suspicion of spying, they depict him as a fairly ordinary American – an Iraq war veteran, former sheriff’s deputy and corporate security expert who, his brother says is a loyal friend and family member.

“We are deeply concerned for his safety and well-being,” the Whelan family said in a statement that his twin brother, David Whelan, posted on Twitter. “His innocence is undoubted and we trust that his rights will be respected.”

David Whelan later told CNN about that he learned that his brother, who had been in Russia for a wedding, had been detained from a news story.

According to David Whelan, Paul Whelan served multiple tours in Iraq as a marine and is a corporate security expert. Paul Whelan had made several trips to Russia in..