At end-of-year celebrations7xm, some bosses give their employees gifts of appreciation and extend warm wishes. On Saturday, Pope Francis used his annual Christmas message to the leaders of the Vatican’s various departments to admonish them.

Again.

“A church community lives in joyful and fraternal harmony to the extent that its members walk in the life of humility, renouncing thinking the worst and speaking ill of others,” Francis told the cardinals and prelates who make up the Vatican’s administration.

He also touched on a personal bugaboo: gossip.

“Gossip is an evil that destroys social life, sickens people’s hearts and leads to nothing,” Francis said.

For years, Francis has used his Christmas message to the Curia, as the Vatican administration is known, to air his concerns about the workplace environment in the tiny city-state and to urge his top advisers to do some soul-searching.

He opened off-topic on Saturday with a reminder of the devastation of the war in Gaza, in what appeared to be a reference to deadly Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip on Friday.

“Yesterday, children were bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war,” he said. “I want to say it, because it touches the heart.”

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Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.

Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.

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