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California widow receives remains of husband, decades after soldier was lost in Korean War
• LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Army Sgt. 1st Class Joseph E. Gantt went off to war 63 years ago, leaving behind a wife who never gave up on his return.
• On Friday, 94-year-old Clara Gantt stood up from her wheelchair and wept in the cold before the flag-draped casket.
• Sgt. Gantt was finally home.
• "He told me if anything happened to him he wanted me to remarry. I told him no, no. Here I am, still his wife," she told reporters at Los Angeles International Airport, where his remains were carried from a jetliner by military honor guard.
• Gant was a field medic who went missing in action on Nov. 30, 1950 during the Korean War while serving with Battery C, 503rd Field Artillery, 2nd Infantry Division, according to the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office in Washington, D.C.
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Pope warns against mediocrity, gossip, bureaucratic squabbling at Vatican in speech to Curia
• VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Francis has warned Vatican administrators that their work can take a downward spiral into mediocrity, gossip and bureaucratic squabbling if they forget that theirs is a professional vocation of service to the church.
• Francis made the comments Saturday in his Christmas address to the Vatican Curia, the bureaucracy that forms the central government of the 1.2-billion strong Roman Catholic Church. The speech was eagerly anticipated given that Francis was elected on a mandate to overhaul the antiquated and oftentimes dysfunctional administration.
• Just last week Francis reshuffled the powerful Congregation for Bishops, removing the arch-conservative American Cardinal Raymond Burke as well as the head of Italy's bishops' conference and another hardline Italian, Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, earlier axed from the Congregation for Clergy.
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