Journey

VATICAN CITY - The following, from the Associated Press, is the Vatican's official English translation of Pope Francis' "Urbi et Orbi" speech (To the City and the World) delivered in Italian from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica on Wednesday night. Brothers and sisters, good evening! You know that it was the duty of the Conclave to give Rome a Bishop. It seems that my brother Cardinals have gone to the ends of the earth to get one... but here we are. ... I thank you for your welcome.

With its history of inhabiting and mixing song genres, Lyricfest eventually was bound to find its way to the spiritual and its offshoots, and did so Sunday with singers who packed the First Presbyterian Church: Denyce Graves, Lisa Daltirus, and Kevin Deas. Lyricfest has a penchant for spoken commentary, and this "Journey Toward Freedom" program had the Rev. Charles Rice sketching the Civil Rights movement's progress, interspersed with songs by Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and more classically slanted pieces by Ricky Ian Gordon, a great champion of Langston Hughes.

Did a travel experience move you, change you, give you a new take on life or just great memories? Tell us how, in 500 words or fewer. And send us a photo, with caption information. Include a daytime phone number. If we publish your piece, we'll pay you $25. ( Response volume prohibits our returning or acknowledging your manuscripts or photos. ) You can send your story: By e-mail, to: inquirer.travel@phillynews.com Please put "Personal Journey" in the subject line.

LONDON - A British couple's round-the-world cycling odyssey ended in tragedy when both of them were killed in a road accident in Thailand. Peter Root and Mary Thompson, who had been chronicling their journey in a blog, died Wednesday when they were hit by a pickup truck in a province east of Bangkok, Thai police said Monday. The couple, both 34 and from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, left Britain in July 2011 and had cycled through Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and China.

By Sonia Sotomayor Alfred A. Knopf. 336 pp. $27.95 Reviewed by Héctor Tobar Some of the most revealing moments in Sonia Sotomayor's stirring new memoir, My Beloved World , come early in the book's 300-plus pages. The future Supreme Court justice is a mere 9 years old when her father dies in her family's apartment in a Bronx housing project. He was a brokenhearted man with an artist's soul and a weakness for Seagram's 7 that eventually killed him. Juan Sotomayor's family is devastated by his early death.

My grandmother Anna Altmayer came to America in 1914. She was 17 years old. She traveled with her father, leaving her mother and three younger brothers back in Hercegfalva, a small farm village in Hungary. Her father found her a position as a maid and cook in Ridgewood, N.J., and then sailed back home. The plan was for her to save up enough money to bring the others over. But that never happened. World War I broke out within a few months, making travel close to impossible. Why they never came over after the war, I don't know.

Come out of your shell this weekend and learn how turtles have been able to adapt and survive since prehistoric times at Adventure Aquarium's newest exhibit "Turtles: Journey of Survival. " On display through March 24, the exhibit features more than 20 species of land and sea turtles from around the globe. Each day activities will educate about their biology, evolution, and living habitats. At "The Journey of Five Turtles," a daily interactive show in the Ocean Realm Dive Theater, visitors can learn about vulnerable species and meet Loggerhead Bob; Ozzy, a 3-month-old hatchling; and green sea turtles Old Green and Stitches.

'Sometimes things just fall out of the sky; sometimes you're tugging on it pretty hard," says Iris DeMent. She's talking from her Iowa City home about the songwriting process of Sing the Delta , her first album of original songs in 16 years and the impetus for the short tour that brings her to Wilmington's World Cafe Live at the Queen on Tuesday. "There's one song on there that there's a line that I literally, I'm not exaggerating, sat on the floor six or eight hours a day for three or four days in a row just to get that one line.

ON APRIL 16, 2012, Suhaila Teran Ponce, of Peru, was in the wrong place at the wrong time and almost died because of it. Six months later, the 5-year-old arrived in Philly, a medical mecca that is the right place for her to rebuild her life. But until the Daily News got involved, Suhaila's father, Florentino Teran Vasquez, worried that bad timing, once again, might derail his daughter's future. Her recent past has been hell. On that lovely April afternoon, Florentino, 37, was working at the hotel where he tends bar. Suhaila, her mother, Beatriz, 32, and her other daughter, Diana, 9, were strolling home from Diana's school in Cajamarca, Peru, north of the capital of Lima.

Traffic alert: There's an epic pileup in Middle-earth, and it doesn't end at the troll-hoard on the Great East Road. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey , Peter Jackson's bloated and blustery adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's fairy-tale gem about a furry-footed homebody handpicked to go a-questing with a band of potbellied dwarfs, all manner of creatures collide in all manner of ways on all manner of terrain. Orcs and wars, elves and goblins, Great Eagles and Great Spiders, furry little ponies and giants made of stone, not to mention a dragon asleep on a mountainous pile of loot and an emaciated hobbit corrupted by avarice - it's a bumper-to-bumper mess, and you can rubberneck it all in 3-D if you care to shell out the extra silver pennies.