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NEW YORK (AP) — Calls to prayer rang out from a Bronx mosque Wednesday as a bereaved community prepares to bury its dead — 17 souls — in the coming days and families seek closure from New York City's most devastating fire in decades.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Business owner Tim James appealed to evangelical Christian voters as he opened his Republican campaign for Alabama governor Wednesday, railing against the threat of “godless Marxism,” quoting scripture and claiming God has called the conservative state to lead the nation.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Sen. Harry Reid was remembered Wednesday as a “legendary leader,” as colleagues and friends gathered at the U.S. Capitol to pay tribute to a hardscrabble Democrat who rose from poverty in a dusty Nevada mining town to the most powerful position in the Senate.
UPPER DARBY, Pa. (AP) — Federal investigators pored over the wreckage of a medical helicopter a day after it crash-landed without loss of life next to a church in a residential area of suburban Philadelphia, somehow avoiding a web of power lines and buildings.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — After decades of dealing with the boyhood trauma of being molested by a priest, Jim Bartko sued the Roman Catholic church two years ago.
But the lawsuit was dismissed when he died four days after speaking publicly about it.
NEW DELHI (AP) — India’s top court on Wednesday said it will take up a petition seeking prosecution of several saffron-robed Hindu religious leaders for allegedly making highly provocative speeches against Muslims at a closed-door meeting last month.
ATLANTA (AP) — Pounding his hand for emphasis, President Joe Biden challenged senators Tuesday to “stand against voter suppression” by changing Senate rules to pass voting rights legislation that Republicans are blocking from debate and votes.
PIERRE, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem on Tuesday said she would push legislation to ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, as she laid out a sharply conservative list of priorities to start the state's legislative session.
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis grew up listening to the opera on the radio, is a fan of Argentine tango and thinks Mozart “lifts you to God.”
But it still came as a something of a shock to see the 85-year-old pontiff coming out of a downtown Rome record shop late Tuesday with a CD in hand.
ROME (AP) — The Catholic Church in Rome on Tuesday strongly condemned as “offensive and unacceptable” a funeral procession outside a local church in which the casket was draped in a Nazi flag and mourners gave the fascist salute.
BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Patriarch Porfirije, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, has tested positive for COVID-19, the church said Tuesday, amid a surge in infections in the country and elsewhere in the Balkan region.
NEW YORK (AP) — Sorrow welled across a Bronx community Monday, a day after a fire and choking smoke engulfed a high-rise apartment building and claimed the lives of 17 people, eight of them children.
FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — Gruyere cheese does not have to come from the Gruyere region of Europe to be sold under the gruyere name, a federal judge has ruled.
A consortium of Swiss and French cheesemakers from the region around the town of Gruyeres, Switzerland, sued in U.S.
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis took the first step Monday to reorganize the Vatican’s powerful doctrine office, removing the No. 2 official widely believed responsible for a controversial document barring blessings for same-sex couples because God “cannot bless sin.”
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis suggested Monday that getting vaccinated against the coronavirus was a “moral obligation" and denounced how people had been swayed by “baseless information” to refuse one of the most effective measures to save lives during the pandemic.
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis offered his condolences Monday to the victims of the “devastating” apartment fire in the Bronx borough of New York that killed 19 people, nine of them children.
Francis sent a telegram to New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan offering “heartfelt condolences and the assurance of his spiritual closeness” to those affected by the blaze.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Khader al-Najjar has been unable to leave the Gaza Strip since he returned to the Palestinian territory 25 years ago, not even to seek medical treatment for a spinal ailment or to bid farewell to his mother, who died in Jordan last year.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's national library says the number of visitors to its Arabic website more than doubled last year, driven by a growing collection of digitized materials and an aggressive outreach campaign to the Arab world.
BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s new parliament reelected its speaker for a second term Sunday, the first step toward forming a new government after a general election whose results have been contested by powerful Iran-backed factions.
WASHINGTON (AP) — In what's become a familiar scene, President Joe Biden lingered after delivering a recent speech on the pandemic as reporters fired a barrage of questions.
He bristled at a query about the shortage of COVID-19 rapid tests, answered another about omicron-spurred travel restrictions and sidestepped a third about whether Sen.
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Amid Bosnia’s greatest political crisis since the end of its 1992-95 interethnic war, the country’s Serbs celebrated an outlawed holiday Sunday with a provocative parade showcasing armored vehicles, police helicopters and law enforcement officers with rifles, marching in lockstep and singing a nationalist song.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis baptized 16 babies in the splendor of the Sistine Chapel on Sunday, resuming a decades-old Vatican tradition which had been interrupted last year by the pandemic.
Francis told the parents of the nine girls and seven boys whom he formally ushered into the Catholic church through baptism that their duty was to “preserve the Christian identity” of their children.
PARIS (AP) — Egyptian-Palestinian human rights activist Ramy Shaath arrived in Paris and reunited with his wife on Saturday, after Egyptian authorities released him from prison and deported him.
An overjoyed Shaath, the son of a prominent Palestinian politician, walked out of the Charles de Gaulle airport smiling, holding hands with his wife, Céline Lebrun Shaath, a French national, and waving to a cheering crowd of supporters.
NEW DELHI (AP) — India’s government has allowed Mother Teresa’s charity to receive foreign funds, weeks after blocking it saying the Catholic organization did not meet conditions under local laws, a lawmaker said Saturday.
CALI, Colombia (AP) — For the first time in years, Víctor Escobar stopped taking most of the medicines needed for his lung disease. There was no longer any need. On Friday evening, he became the first Colombian to be euthanized despite not yet being in terminal condition.
MOSCOW (AP) — Orthodox Christians in Russia, Serbia and other countries observed Christmas on Friday amid restrictions aimed at dampening the spread of the coronavirus, but few worshipers appeared concerned as they streamed into churches on Christmas Eve.
MOSCOW (AP) — Security forces in Kazakhstan killed dozens of protesters and 12 police officers died in an eruption of violence that saw demonstrators storm government buildings and set them on fire, authorities said Thursday.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Christians around the world on Thursday marked Epiphany, known as Three Kings Day for Catholics and the Baptism of Christ for the Orthodox, with a series of celebrations.
LONDON (AP) — A top European court declined Thursday to rule in a high-profile discrimination case centered on an activist's request to have a cake decorated with the “Sesame Street” characters Bert and Ernie and the words “Support Gay Marriage.”
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib announced Wednesday she will seek reelection in a new Detroit-area seat created through redistricting, hours after fellow Democratic Rep. Brenda Lawrence said she will retire from Congress rather than run in the district.
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A rabbi who was badly wounded in a deadly antisemitic attack at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Southern California was sentenced Tuesday to 14 months in federal prison for running a multimillion-dollar donation fraud, authorities said.
An unidentified person paid a ransom that freed three missionaries kidnapped by a gang in Haiti under an agreement that was supposed to have led to the release of all 15 remaining captives early last month, workers for their Ohio-based organization have confirmed.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — University of Florida President Kent Fuchs announced Wednesday that 2022 will be his final year in office and that he plans to return to the classroom.
Fuchs, 67, said in a video address that he informed Board of Trustees Chairman Mori Hosseini of his decision last August, and they agreed to make it public this month.
DOVER, Del. (AP) — A preliminary voting report in the Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy indicates the group’s reorganization plan has failed to win the desired support from tens of thousands of men who say they were sexually abused as children.
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis called Wednesday for simplified adoption procedures and urged couples to have more children as he presided over his first general audience of the New Year with a novel supporting cast that emphasized his call for a less-clericalized Catholic Church.

