Pope Francis arrived in the City of Brotherly Love on Saturday for the final leg of his U.S. visit — a festive weekend devoted to celebrating Catholic families.
The pontiff’s plane touched down at the Philadelphia airport after takeoff from New York, bringing him to a city of blocked-off streets, sidewalks lined with portable potties, and checkpoints manned by police, National Guardsmen and border agents.
After speeches to Congress and the United Nations earlier this week aimed at spurring world leaders toward bold action on immigration and the environment, he is expected to focus more heavily on ordinary Catholics during his two days in Philadelphia.
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NICHOLAS KAMM via Getty Images
Pope Francis arrives in Philadelphia on September 26, 2015, on the final leg of his six-day visit to the US.
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House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will resign from Congress at the end of October, his office announced Friday.
In a statement, Boehner’s office said that he had only planned to serve in Congress until the end of last year, but changed his plans when former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) lost his seat.
Boehner was facing pressure from conservative Republicans over a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, and there were rumors that those members would try to oust him as speaker. Boehner, who was first elected to Congress in 1990, became speaker in 2011.
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Iran reached a historic deal with six world powers on Tuesday that promises to curb Tehran’s controversial nuclear program in exchange for economic sanctions relief.
The accord was announced on Tuesday by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini in a joint statement in the Austrian capital, Vienna.
Zarif acknowledged that the final agreement wasn’t perfect, but described the announcement as a “historic moment.”
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History was made in the ballet world this week when soloist Misty Copeland was promoted to principal dancer, thereby becoming the first black female principal in the 75-year history of the American Ballet Theatre.
Copeland, now 32 years old, has been dancing with the American Ballet Theatre for over 14 years, nearly eight as a soloist. Most recently, she starred as Odette/Odile in “Swan Lake” at the Met, a role dance critic Alastair Macaulay called “the most epic role in world ballet.”
Copeland’s name is known far beyond the traditional confines of the ballet world, in part due to her emphatic openness regarding the problematic relationship between race and ballet. As Elizabeth Blair explained on NPR: “It’s hard for any ballet dancer to succeed, regardless of race, but a black dancer is up against a centuries-old aesthetic — the idea, for example, that the swan must be feather-weight and snow white, and so does her prince.” tangie
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Misty Copeland principal dancer American Ballet Theatre
The latest and possibly the last serious effort to cripple Obamacare through the courts has just failed.
On Thursday, for the second time in three years, the Supreme Court rejected a major lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — thereby preserving the largest expansion in health coverage since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid half a century ago.
The stakes of the case, King v. Burwell, were enormous. Had the plaintiffs prevailed, millions of people who depend upon the Affordable Care Act for insurance would have lost financial assistance from the federal government. Without that money, most of them would have had to give up coverage altogether. And the loss of so many customers would have forced insurers to raise premiums, seriously disrupting state insurance markets.
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The GOP-controlled House passed legislation Tuesday to cut Amtrak’s budget by $242 million, though lawmakers added new funding for video cameras inside locomotive cabs to record engineers and help investigators get to the bottom of crashes such as last month’s deadly derailment in Philadelphia.
Amtrak announced last month it is going to install the cameras after years of delays. The transportation and housing measure approved by a narrow 216-210 vote contains $9 million approved last week to fund the inward-facing camera initiative in the budget year starting in October.
Amtrak is among many domestic programs whose budgets are cut or frozen by the GOP measures, as automatic spending curbs known as sequestration are again hitting federal agencies after two years of relief. Previous House GOP attempts to cut Amtrak over the years have been reversed, and Tuesday’s transportation measure is but an opening move in a longer chess match with the White House over spending levels for agency operating budgets passed annually by Congress.
A grand jury has indicted a former South Carolina police officer in the April shooting of an unarmed black man, the prosecutor announced on Monday.
Former North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager, 33, has been charged with murder in the death of Walter Scott, 50.
“I think the people of the 9th circuit elected me to be accountable to them, and that’s what we intend to do,” Charleston County Solicitor Scarlett Wilson said during a news conference following the announcement of the indictment Monday. “They have to know they have someone prosecuting the case who is accountable to them.”
FIFA, the international soccer governing body, could strip Russia and Qatar of their World Cup hosting rights if evidence comes to light there was corruption in the bidding process, a FIFA official said Sunday.
Domenico Scala, the chairman of FIFA’s audit and compliance committee, said that 2018 World Cup host Russia and 2022 World Cup host Qatar could be in trouble if allegations of bribery turn out to be true, Reuters reported.
“If evidence should emerge that the awards to Qatar and Russia only came about thanks to bought votes, then the awards could be invalidated,” Scala told the Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung Sunday. “This evidence has not yet been brought forth.”
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China-based hackers are suspected of breaking into the computer networks of the U.S. government personnel office and stealing identifying information of at least 4 million federal workers, American officials said Thursday.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that data from the Office of Personnel Management and the Interior Department had been compromised.
“The FBI is conducting an investigation to identify how and why this occurred,” the statement said.
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Scientists from the University of California at Irvine may have found a way to restore the youthful flexibility of the still-developing brain. In a study on mice recently published in the journal Neuron, the researchers were able to re-activate a younger neural state in an older brain.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Misty Copeland principal dancer American Ballet Theatre
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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