Names and faces
■ Pope Francis celebrated the Catholic Church’s first World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly on Sunday, soliciting a round of applause from the faithful in St. Peter’s Square and urging people everywhere to reach out to older generations. “Grandparents and grandchildren, the elderly and youth together showed one of the beautiful sides of the church, and showed the alliance between the generations,” the pontiff said from a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square. “To celebrate this day, I invite celebration in every community with visits to grandparents and elderly, those who are most alone, to bring them my message, inspired by Jesus: ‘I am with you every day.’” He said just as the elderly need young people, young people need the elderly, “especially in this throw-away culture.” “The grandparents have the sap of history, that rises and gives strength for the tree to grow,” Francis said. If young people and the elderly don’t meet and talk, “history does not go on, life does not go on. We need to resume this: It is a challenge for our culture. Grandparents have the right to dream while watching young people, and young people have the right to prophecy by taking sap from grandparents,” he said.
■ Federal prosecutors in R. Kelly’s sex-trafficking case say he had sexual contact with an underage boy in addition to girls, and the government wants jurors to hear those claims. Jury selection is set to start Aug. 9 in a New York federal court. Kelly denies ever abusing anyone. Prosecutors aired a wide-ranging raft of additional allegations — but not new charges — against the R&B star in a court filing late last week. The Grammy Award-winning singer is charged with leading what prosecutors call a criminal enterprise of managers, bodyguards and other employees who are alleged to have helped him recruit women and girls for sex and pornography and to exercise control over them. The charges involve six women and girls. Now prosecutors want jurors to hear about more than a dozen other people whom they allege Kelly sexually or physically abused, threatened or otherwise mistreated. Among them, the government says, was a 17-year-old boy, an aspiring musician whom Kelly met at a McDonald’s in December 2006 and later invited to his Chicago studio. After asking the boy what he would do to make it in the music business, Kelly propositioned and had sexual contact with him, according to the latest court filing. When Kelly was about to be tried on child pornography charges in 2008, the same youth told the singer he had access to a juror, and Kelly asked him to contact the juror and vouch that he was a “good guy,” prosecutors wrote. The filing doesn’t say whether the youth did so. Kelly was acquitted in that case.