Pope Francis, the first Latin American leader of the Roman Catholic Church, died on Monday after a prolonged illness. He was 88.

Two-year-old Sumaiya Ansari, a resident of India’s Byrnihat town which is ranked the world’s most polluted metropolitan area by Swiss Group IQAir, was battling breathing problems for several days before she was hospitalised in March and given oxygen.

“My feeling is that an era is over,” says Massimo Faggioli, professor of theology at Villanova University in Philadelphia, speaking half an hour after the announcement of Pope Francis’s death.

China will sanction United States officials, lawmakers and leaders of nongovernmental organizations who it says have “performed poorly” on Hong Kong issues, the foreign ministry announced.

Pope Francis, the first Jesuit leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Roman Catholics and the first to come from the Southern Hemisphere, died Monday at age 88, the Vatican announced.

Catholic Spain is mourning the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday at the age of 88, with numerous politicians expressing their condolences for a pontiff “committed to social justice” and “defending the most vulnerable”.