Lifestyle
Pope Francis’ ordinary shoes bring pride to his Argentine neighborhood and his cobbler
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — The man who would become Pope Francis always bought his shoes in the same small store. And now, the remarkably ordinary footwear that surprised and charmed millions has brought pride to his old Buenos Aires neighborhood — and to his cobbler.
The simple black shoes — a stark contrast to the flashy ruby red slippers of Francis’ predecessor, former Pope Benedict XVI — are among the pope’s personal effects that have captured attention as his death this week triggers an outpouring of emotion around the Roman Catholic world.
The seemingly comfortable loafers offer a powerful reminder of Francis’ humility, simplicity and lack of ceremony that helped him relate to ordinary people wherever he went.
A third-generation cobbler
The Muglia family men were the first cobblers in the middle-class Flores neighborhood of western Buenos Aires. Their shop, Muglia Shoes, opened in 1945, just a few years after Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio to Italian immigrant parents.
A photograph of the late Pope Francis sits in the window of the Muglia shoe store alongside the model of shoes that Jorge Bergoglio used in the Flores neighborhood where he grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, April 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
A pair of shoes like the ones regularly worn by Jorge Bergoglio are displayed at Muglia shoe store in the Flores neighborhood where the late Pope Francis grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, April 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
There wasn’t much competition, so when a young Bergoglio came in to buy shoes, it was Juan Jose Muglia’s grandfather who sold him the first pair. Bergoglio was in his 20s then, serving as a Jesuit priest at the Basilica of San José de Flores just around the block.
“My father, my grandfather, they told me stories about how Father Jorge came from the church around the corner to buy these shoes, they were the ones he liked, he wore them all the time,” Muglia, 52, told The Associated Press on Thursday.
“They’re simple, it’s the kind of shoes that waiters like to wear today, Muglia said, holding up a pair of the handmade lace-up loafers. “They can last you years and years.”
When Muglia took over after his father’s death, he added a poster of Elvis Presley, a Harley Davidson motorbike and a vinyl turntable to give the place a hipster note.
A time gone by
The racks now display newer fashions like pointy boat shoes and bright patent leather numbers.
But much of the shop remains the same, including the pinewood-paneled walls, floor-to-ceiling shelves of cream-colored shoeboxes and, of course, the leather black loafers with grippy, nonslip soles that Francis repeatedly purchased, inspiring local Catholic priests to do the same.
“Priests came here from all the basilicas in the city, some young priests even came from Rome to buy them,” said Muglia.
Juan Jose Muglia shows the shoe model, right, that was regularly worn by Jorge Bergoglio at the Muglia shoe store in the Flores neighborhood where the late Pope Francis grew up and where Muglia’s father and grandfather attended the former pope at their shop in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, April 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
They sell for around $170 today — far more than the price-tag Francis saw — due to Argentina’s runaway inflation.
When Francis became pope in 2013, Muglia said he offered to send the pontiff off to St. Peter’s with a new pair of his favorite shoes. But he recalled Francis saying that his feet had become too swollen in his old age and he needed to find a more customized fit that he could depend on in Rome.
Papal footwear
Rather than adopt the typical papal shoes — red velvet or silk — as pope, Francis didn’t stray from his Flores roots.
He chose normal black shoes with an orthopedic sole — a far cry from the Byzantine era, when pilgrims customarily kissed a decorative cross embroidered on the papal shoe, and from the era of Pope Benedict, whose bespoke leather slippers in a succulent tomato red prompted Esquire Magazine to name the former pontiff “Accessorizer of the Year” in 2007, prompting intense speculation about the designer brand.
As years passed, beyond the occasional priest or parishioner who dropped into Muglia Shoes, few ever wondered about the brand of Francis’ plain footwear.
But that changed when Francis died on Monday at the age of 88, setting off a frenzy of interest about his Flores roots. Around the world, Francis was remembered for paring down the papacy’s inherited pomp to become more accessible — swapping the fur-trimmed velvet cape that popes had worn since the Renaissance for a simple white cassock, and preferring a Ford Focus to the usual papal limo.
As word spread about his original footwear and local journalists flooded the neighborhood, Muglia said curious customers have bombarded him with requests. He placed a framed portrait of Francis prominently in his window.
“It was a world of people,” Muglia said. “They came from everywhere.”
A neighborhood remembers
In Flores, the mourning for Francis feels personal. Residents remember him as someone who lived frugally, visited and advocated for the city’s poorest and could often be found sharing Argentina’s signature yerba maté drink with old friends and strangers.
At the newspaper stand just down the block from Muglia Shoes, vendor Antonio Plastina, 69, recalled how he and Francis made small-talk “like any two Argentines, a bit of this and that, some politics mixed with soccer.”
A woman prays by a statue of Jesus at the Basilica de San Jose de Flores, where the future Pope Francis, known as Jorge Bergoglio, first realized his calling to become a priest at age 17, in the Flores neighborhood where he grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, April 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
“He was a marvelous person, those are beautiful memories,” Plastina said, his eyes welling up. After becoming archbishop and cardinal, Francis still made the half-hour drive to Flores from downtown Buenos Aires every Sunday before church.
He always bought the two main Argentine daily papers, Plastina said, and read the news with a cup of coffee at the quiet cafe across the street, now a mattress store on a traffic-clogged intersection.
Although the crowds that poured into Flores upon learning of Francis’ death largely tapered out by Thursday, they left a mass of bouquets and handwritten notes to their beloved pontiff at the iron-barred windows of Membrillar 531, the modest house where Francis grew up as the eldest of five siblings.
“My vision is going but my memory is long,” said Alicia Gigante, 91, Francis’ neighbor and family friend, who stopped at the house on Thursday morning, leaning on her daughter for support.
“I’ll remember him for a long time, always his kindness, his smile, and that greeting, when you rang the doorbell and he came out into the street,” she said, her voice trembling. “There he was, always the same, he would caress you and bless you.”
A woman lights a candle by the confessional at the Basilica de San Jose de Flores where the future Pope Francis, known as Jorge Bergoglio, first realized his calling to become a priest at age 17, in the Flores neighborhood where he grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, April 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Thousands of people are gathering in New Mexico for a celebration showcasing Native American and Indigenous dancers, musicians and artisans from around the world.
Billed by organizers as the largest powwow in North America, the annual Gathering of Nations festival kicks off Friday with a colorful procession of dancers spiraling into the center of an arena at the New Mexico state fairgrounds. Participants wear elaborate regalia adorned with jingling bells and dance to the tempo of rhythmic drumming.
The event also features the crowning of Miss Indian World, as well as horse parades in which riders are judged on the craftsmanship of their intricately beaded adornments or feathered headdresses and how well they work with their horses.
Powwow roots
Powwows are a relatively modern phenomenon that emerged in the 1800s as the U.S. government seized land from tribes throughout the Northern and Southern Plains. Forced migrations and upheaval during this period resulted in intertribal solidarity among Plains people and those from the southern prairies of Canada.
Alliances were formed, giving way to the exchange of songs and dances during gatherings between different tribes. In the decades that followed, powwows were advertised to pioneers heading westward as “authentic” Native American dance shows. For some, it was an exploitation of their cultures.
The word powwow was derived from pau wau, an Algonquian Narrtick word for “medicine man,” according to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Scholars say English settlers misused the word to refer to the meetings of medicine men and later to any kind of Native American gathering.
Today, some of the large powwows like the Gathering of Nations have become more commercialized events that use dancing and drumming competitions with big prize money to provide a glimpse into Indigenous cultures.
Reconnecting with culture
At ceremonial dances, participants wear traditional regalia specific to their tribe, whereas powwow attire often is more contemporary and flashy with sequins and sparkles. It’s about dressing to impress the judges, said Warren Queton, a Kiowa Tribe legislator and adjunct instructor at the University of Oklahoma who has participated in community dancing and cultural events since he was a boy.
Queton, who served as the head gourd dancer at the university’s recent spring powwow, said ceremonial dances are deeply rooted in community, identity and cultural values.
It’s a struggle to keep traditional cultural practices and commercial powwows from being lumped into the same category, he said. They have very different meanings in Native American and Indigenous cultures.
There has been a focus on promoting smaller powwows held in tribal communities. Queton said these gatherings serve as a way for people who live elsewhere to return home and reconnect with their families and the land, and to share traditions with younger generations.
“Knowing where you come from, your land, your oral traditions, your language, but also values and traits — that can only be learned from a community,” he said. “That’s why those smaller dances are so important because people learn those community values. They’re all a part of our identity.”
Capturing good energy
There still are elements of tradition woven in to modern powwows. Competitors wear feathered bustles, buckskin dresses, fringed shawls and beaded head and hair pieces. Some of the elaborate outfits are hand-stitched designs that can take months to complete.
The sounds, movements and emotions that radiate from the dancing are challenging to capture on canvas. But Cochiti Pueblo painter Mateo Romero did just that when he partnered with the U.S. Postal Service to create a series of powwow stamps to be unveiled Friday during Gathering of Nations.
Powerfully hypnotic, atavistic and somatic is how the artist describes the dancing. One of his pieces depicts what is known as a fancy shawl dance with its dips, pivots, hops and twirls. Each tassel on the shawl flows and flips, accentuating the dancer’s movements.
Romero said he used color, thick and thin paint and soft and hard edges along with photographic elements to create something that feels alive, embedded with feeling and bright pops of color.
Romero called it a huge honor to transform powwow culture into a postage stamp filled with “good energy.”
“I look at it as a sort of vehicle to express this sentiment, the energy, the celebration, the vibration, the beauty of it,” he said. “It’s the power of it.”
Lifestyle
Private equity executive raped and tortured women at his Manhattan apartment, prosecutors say
NEW YORK (AP) — A private equity executive turned his New York City apartment into a torture chamber of “grotesque sexual violence,” Manhattan prosecutors said Thursday. The 43-year-old is accused of raping six women over five months in a depraved rampage in which he punched, waterboarded and shocked victims with a cattle prod and kept recordings of the assaults as trophies.
Ryan Hemphill, who remains jailed after his arrest last month, pleaded not guilty to a 116-count indictment charging him with predatory sexual assault and other crimes dating to last October. Hemphill, who is also a lawyer, threatened to have victims arrested or disappeared in a bid to keep them silent, prosecutors said.
“The defendant told these survivors that he was untouchable,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said. “The indictment makes clear that he was wrong.”
Hemphill sat quietly in a khaki jail suit, his cuffed hands clutching a cross behind his back, as a prosecutor described his alleged crimes in gruesome detail.
If convicted, Hemphill could spend the rest of his life in prison. He was previously acquitted in 2015 of choking and holding a knife to his ex-girlfriend’s throat after testifying that he enjoyed strangling her during sex.
“We have reason to believe these six victims are only the tip of the iceberg,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Mirah Curzer told Judge Ann E. Scherzer.
Hemphill’s apartment, near the Empire State Building, was outfitted with numerous surveillance cameras, and investigators have recovered images showing dozens, if not hundreds, of other women, many of them naked and blindfolded, Curzer said.
Investigators also found hundreds of bullets and high-capacity magazines, and a large amount of drugs, including heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, and fentanyl, prosecutors said.
Hemphill met the six women through websites, including some that specialize in “sugar daddy” arrangements for women seeking wealthy romantic partners, Curzer said.
He told the women he was into role play and dominance and offered them large sums of money in exchange for sex and companionship, though he ended up not paying some of the women or giving them fake cash instead, Curzer said.
As Hemphill got to know the women, he convinced them to confide their past sexual traumas, which he then deliberately reenacted as he assaulted them, Curzer said. He took advantage of some victims’ inexperience, the prosecutor said, or crossed boundaries that victims had clearly articulated.
Hemphill is accused of tricking victims into ingesting substances that rendered them unable to fight back, using handcuffs and other restraints on them, wrapping their heads and faces with duct tape, slapping and punching them, and torturing them with a cattle prod and shock collar.
Hemphill kept one victim shackled to a bed for hours while she begged him to let her go, Curzer said.
Hemphill’s alleged conduct is “truly shocking to the conscience,” and he “has made clear that he has no regard for the law or the courts,” Curzer said.
To keep women quiet, Hemphill boasted about connections to law enforcement and organized crime, prosecutors said, and claimed that because the women had accepted offers of money, it was them who would be arrested.
Hemphill is charged with bribing a witness and, according to prosecutors, drew up a contract in which he agreed to pay a woman $2,000 in exchange for dropping a complaint she filed with police. He is also accused of forcing some victims to record videos in which they stated that they had consented to being abused.
“The power imbalance in his predatory acts could not be more clear,” Bragg told reporters. “He wielded his law degree and money as both sword and shield, coercing and silencing survivors.”
The arraignment happened down the hall from disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s rape retrial.
Scherzer ordered Hemphill to remain jailed without bail after prosecutors raised concerns that his predicament, combined with his wealth and connections — including a history of philanthropy and family real estate holdings — could give him the means and incentive to flee the country.
Hemphill’s lawyer, a public defender assigned to represent him at least through his arraignment, had urged Scherzer to move him to a rehabilitation facility to deal with substance abuse issues.
Scherzer ruled that, given the fact pattern laid out by prosecutors, “including efforts to dissuade by force and threats to witnesses from testifying against him,” jailing him was the only way to ensure Hemphill would return to court.
Hemphill’s alleged behavior, the judge said, “shows his extent to which he’s willing to go to protect himself from facing these charges.”
Lifestyle
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is ready for more celebratory hugs that can turn into heavy lifting
GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — Nobody lifts more weight at the NFL draft than Commissioner Roger Goodell.
His celebratory hugs with excited first-round picks originated 15 years ago and endured through his back surgery last year. Some players squeeze Goodell so hard they end up lifting him up in the air. Sometimes, the roles get reversed and Goodell does all the carrying.
It’s hard work for a 66-year-old man, even one who’s in shape.
“I do train for that, that’s no joke, I do,” Goodell said Wednesday, adding that he was in the gym earlier in the morning. “And to get through this weekend is physically hard.”
Last year, Goodell had surgery on his back a few weeks before the draft. He walked around gingerly in the days leading up to it and his chiropractor joined him in Detroit.
Draft prospects were aware of Goodell’s condition and mostly took it easy on him until Tennessee drafted JC Latham with the seventh pick. The 6-foot-6, 320-pound offensive tackle walked onto the stage, smacked hands with Goodell and pulled him in for a bear hug, lifting him several inches off the ground.
Everyone watching cringed, especially Goodell’s doctor.
“I did ask if you’re going to do it, just go high, and he did,” Goodell said. “It didn’t hurt and I’m OK so it was a good moment.”
Goodell, who replaced Paul Tagliabue in 2006, remembers his first draft hug came from Gerald McCoy. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers selected McCoy, a defensive tackle from Oklahoma with the third overall pick, in 2010.
“They came to my office, all the players, the day before, and we spent a couple hours, and he was a real jokester, and he still is today,” Goodell said of McCoy, who made six Pro Bowls in 11 seasons. “You can see he’s the leader in the room. He sort of took over the room and he was very funny and you thought that this guy was going to never break down. But he pulled me aside at the end and he said: ‘You know I lost my mother.’
“And when he came out, I thought he was going to kill me. He’s a big guy and it was all emotion. He just was crying and saying: ‘My mother would be so proud of this.’ And it just was a moment that I’ll never forget. And I think it sort of took off from there. I think a few other players did it that year, and then it just sort of, it became a thing. And yeah, I do love it. You’re part of that moment. It’s sometimes painful, sometimes these guys get the best of me. They’re big, and they’re strong, and it is an emotional time, so they don’t even really remember how strong they are.”
In 2019, the 6-foot-4, 315-pound Christian Wilkins nearly knocked Goodell off his feet. He pointed up in the air when he approached Goodell, signaling for a leap. Goodell missed the sign so Wilkins jumped up and nearly floored him. Goodell, who is about 6-foot-2, is no slouch so he held his ground and Wilkins brought him in for a giant hug.
Tyree Wilson walked on stage in 2023 and picked Goodell up like a child, almost like he was about to give him a reverse suplex in wrestling.
The good news for Goodell. He just had his one-year checkup after back surgery and is cleared for lift-off.
___
AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl
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