By CHRIS MEGERIAN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — In Joe Biden’s family, there’s a saying that the three worst words anyone can hear are “you have cancer.”

One decade ago, his son Beau died from a brain tumor. Several years later, his wife Jill had two cancerous lesions removed in her own brush with the disease.

Now it is the former president’s turn. Biden’s office disclosed his prostate cancer diagnosis over the weekend, saying it has already spread to his bones.

Although the cancer can possibly be controlled with treatment, it is no longer curable. The announcement is a bitter revelation that a disease that has brought so much tragedy to Biden’s life could be what ends it.

“Cancer touches us all,” Biden wrote on social media. “Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places.”

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Even before the diagnosis, Biden’s post-presidency was shadowed by questions about his health and whether he should have run for reelection. As questions about his fitness for office mounted, he abandoned the campaign and Donald Trump retook the presidency by defeating Kamala Harris. As the 82-year-old Biden works to safeguard his damaged political legacy, he’ll also be fighting a disease that shaped the final chapters of his decades-long career.

Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president when Beau died in 2015. He decided not to seek the Democratic nomination the following year, which helped clear a path for Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016.

Valerie Jarrett, a longtime Obama adviser, said Biden wanted to “channel his grief into action and figure out how we can do better” on treating cancer to “make sure that other people didn’t have to go through what he went through.”

The effort was formalized as a White House task force, with Biden in charge. After a few years out of office, Biden re-entered politics to campaign against Trump in 2020. The heartache from Beau’s death was never far from the surface though. His eldest son had been Delaware’s attorney general and often viewed as Biden’s political successor.

“Beau should be the one running for president, not me,” Biden said, a thought he echoed on many occasions.

He made fighting cancer a focus for his presidency, resurrecting a “moonshot” initiative to increase funding for research and improve treatment. He unveiled the initiative at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in 2022, echoing the Democratic icon’s famous speech declaring that “we will go to the moon” six decades earlier.

“Beating cancer is something we can do together,” Biden said.

By this point, he had already signed legislation known as the PACT Act to expand healthcare benefits for veterans. The law guarantees treatment for chronic illnesses blamed on burn pits, which were used to dispose of chemicals, tires, plastics, medical equipment and human waste on military bases.

Biden left no doubt that he believed Beau’s death resulted from his service with the National Guard in Iraq.

“When they came home, many of the fittest and best warriors that we sent to war were not the same — headaches, numbness, dizziness, cancer,” he said. “My son Beau was one of them.”

Denis McDonough, who led the Veterans Affairs Department under Biden, said the president didn’t talk about Beau’s death during policy discussions. But he said it was clear that Biden “knew the experience that other families were having, and he was going to be damn sure that we weren’t going to miss an opportunity to address that.”

McDonough recalled that Biden wanted the new law to take effect as quickly as possible.

“He had an option to stretch it out,” he said. “He said no way.”

The following year, first lady Jill Biden had two cancerous lesions removed, one above her right eye and the other on her chest. They were both basal cell carcinoma.

Learning of the diagnosis “was a little harder than I thought,” she told The Associated Press during a trip to Africa.

“I’m lucky,” she said. “Believe me, I am so lucky that they caught it, they removed it, and I’m healthy.”

Biden’s cancer diagnosis is not the first time that he’s faced his own mortality.

Months after ending his first presidential campaign in 1988, he collapsed in a New York hotel room. In his memoir “Promises to Keep,” he described “lightning flashing inside my head, a powerful electrical surge — and then a rip of pain like I’d never felt before.”

He had suffered a brain aneurysm that required surgery. Biden wrote that “I had no real fear of dying. I’d long since accepted the fact that life’s guarantees don’t include a fair shake.”

McDonough imagined that Biden would feel similarly about his current situation.

“He’s always on to the next fight,” he said.

By JAKE COYLE

CANNES, France (AP) — Last year, the Cannes Film Festival produced three best actress nominees at the Oscars. This year’s edition may have just supplied another.

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In Lynne Ramsay’s “Die, My Love,” Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson play a married couple with a newborn who move into an old country house. In Ramsay’s messy and moving marital psychodrama, Lawrence plays an increasingly unhinged young mother named Grace whose postpartum depression reaches darkly hallucinatory extremes.

For Lawrence, the 34-year-old mother of two, making “Die, My Love” was an intensely personal experience.

“It was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what (Grace) would do,” Lawrence told reporters Sunday. “I had just had my firstborn, and there’s not really anything like postpartum. It’s extremely isolating. She doesn’t have a community. She doesn’t have her people. But the truth is, extreme anxiety and extreme depression is isolating, no matter where you are. You feel like an alien.”

“Die, My Love,” which is in competition for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, was one of the most anticipated premieres of the festival. That was owed partly to the widely respect for Ramsey, the Scottish director of “Ratcatcher” (1999), “Movern Callar” (2002) and “ You Were Never Really Here” (2017). Lawrence sought her out for the film.

“I’ve wanted to work with Lynne Ramsay since I saw ‘Ratcatcher’ and I was like, ‘There’s no way,’” said Lawrence. “But we took a chance, and we sent it to her. And I really, I cannot believe that I’m here with you.”

In Ramsay’s “Die, My Love,” adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel, is disorienting experience, pulsating with animalistic urges and manic spurts of violence. As a portrait of a marriage in trouble, it makes “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” look tame.

“Die, My Love” was quickly snapped up by Mubi on Sunday. In easily the biggest sale of the festival, the indie distributor plunked down $24 million for distribution rights to the film in the U.S. and multiple other territories.

Lawrence’s performance, in particular, drew the kind of raves in Cannes that tend to lead to Oscar consideration. Lawrence has been nominated four times by the Academy Awards, winning once for 2013’s “Silver Linings Playbook.”

Since then, much has changed for Lawrence, including becoming a mother. On Saturday, Lawrence said parenthood has been such an enriching experience for her that, she joked, “I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.”

“Having children changes everything. It changes your whole life. It’s brutal and incredible,” Lawrence said. “I didn’t know that I could feel so much.”

“My job has a lot to do with emotion, and they’ve opened up the world to me,” she added. “It’s almost like feeling like a blister or something. So sensitive. So they’ve changed my life, obviously, for the best, and they’ve changed me creatively.”

Pattinson, who recently had his first child with Suki Waterhouse, chimed in that he found having a baby “gives you the biggest trove of energy and inspiration.”

Lawrence mockingly pounced on him: “You get energy?!”

Pattinson let out a sigh. “This question is impossible for a guy to answer correctly,” he said, to laughter.

By TED ANTHONY, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — By the middle of last week, it became clear that something odd was happening. It was about the time that the fake video started circulating about the woman purporting to recount the “situationship” she’d had with Robert Prevost, the new American pope, decades ago when he was just another guy from Chicago.

We’d already seen Topps, the baseball-card company, issue a new card of Pope Leo XIV that was all over eBay. We’d heard about his affinity for the White Sox and seen a glimpse of him in the crowd at the 2005 World Series. And in the wake of online speculation over whether he favored the Chicago beef sandwich or Chicago-style hot dogs, we’d seen Portillo’s, a local eatery, name a sandwich after him — “”a divinely seasoned Italian beef, baptized in gravy and finished with the holy trinity of peppers.”

Then there was the Instagram video featuring two guys outlining the ways the new pontiff was a product of his upbringing: “The pope’s a Midwesterner. Bread and wine is now cheese and beer,” says one. Retorts the other: “The pope’s a Midwesterner. Collection baskets now accept Kohl’s cash.”

Popes: They’re just like us?

The Chicago White Sox honors Pope Leo XIV on the scoreboard before a baseball game against the Miami Marlins, Friday, May 8, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/David Banks)

Not exactly. The former Bob Prevost is hardly just another guy from Chicago. But you wouldn’t know that by the burst of American fanfare surrounding the newly minted Pope Leo XIV. He has been called out for his eating proclivities (Jimmy Fallon: “deep-dish communion wafers?”), for his sports affiliations, for his lively sibling relationships and more. Fake videos of him weighing in on basketball and Donald Trump in classic Midwestern ways are proliferating.

Why are we so focused on making sure the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church is also a regular guy from the Midwest? Some of it is pride, you betcha. But another answer lies in Americans’ peculiar and complex relationship with fame and power that goes way back to the founding of the nation itself.

American ‘regular guy-ism’ began with the nation itself

When the United States became the United States in 1776, it rejected King George III, the crown’s taxes and the ornate accoutrements and sensibilities that surrounded royalty.

In its place grew democracy, effectively the cult of the regular guy. As the decades passed, the sensibility of “effete” royalty from back east — whether “back east” was England or, ultimately, Washington — became scorned. By the time Andrew Jackson’s form of populism began to flourish in the 1830s, the “regular guy” in the rising democratic republic became a revered trope. Thus the tales of Abraham Lincoln growing up in a log cabin and splitting rails just like the rest of us — or, at least, the 19th-century rural American “rest of us.”

“Our culture is one that is based on the rejection of monarchy and class distinctions and yet is fascinated by monarchies and those who we see as set above and apart,” says David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. “We want these figure to look up to but also to sit down with.”

And it has stayed that way, politically and culturally, right up until today.

A man takes a picture of a brochure that reads “A prayer of thankfulness for the election of Pope Leo XIV” during a mass at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, Sunday, May 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

Think about how the ideal presidential candidate has evolved from the time of, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt, an effete Easterner who favored a long cigarette holder, to today. Ronald Reagan talked in the homespun language of hearth and home. Bill Clinton played a sax and answered the time-honored question of “boxers or briefs.” George Bush, now a nondrinker, became “a guy you’d want to have a beer with.” (Jon Stewart famously shot that down by saying: “I want my president to be the designated driver.”)

This down-to-Earth sensibility was evident in the press conference that American cardinals held after Leo was elevated. No intense church music accompanied their entrance; instead, it was “American Pie” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” — foundational pillars of popular culture, with an emphasis on “popular.” The message: This is not a “back east” pope.

“Popes have always been alien — strangers,” says John Baick, an American historian at Western New England University. “We like and trust that he is one of us. The Midwest is the place of hard work, the place of decency, the place of listening, the place of manners. This is the person you want to sit on the other side of that diner on a Sunday morning.”

He places Leo’s ascension as a bookend to John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 — a resounding signal, this time globally, that Catholicism is compatible with Americanism.

But as for the “he’s one of us” approach, that says more about the people watching Leo than about the actual pope. “He has done none of this himself,” Baick says. “The connections are things that we have desperately created. We are so desperate for normalcy, for a regular guy.”

This guy is far more than the pope next door

And yet …

Americans famously adored Princess Diana, “the people’s princess.” People like the Kennedys and Grace Kelly — before she became an actual princess — were referred to as “American royalty.” And even though we’re a long way from the days of Bogie, Bacall and Greta Garbo — a generation into the “Stars: They’re Just Like Us” era — Americans still love to put people on pedestals and bring them back down, sometimes at the same time.

Grace Mellor prays as she holds a brochure that reads “A prayer of thankfulness for the election of Pope Leo XIV” during a mass at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, Sunday, May 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

The latest iteration of this is tied to reality TV, which took regular people and turned them into personalities, figures, commodities.

“This country is positioned as a place where anybody can succeed. It plays directly into that — the regular person who succeeds on a large scale,” says Danielle Lindemann, author of “True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.”

“We’re kind of obsessed with this everyday Joe who is plucked from obscurity and becomes famous. In the United States, that’s a salient and dominant narrative,” says Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. “We almost feel like we have relationships with these people. We’re getting so much personal information about him, and it facilitates that sense of closeness.”

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Prevost, of course, is not your average Midwesterner. His Spanish, among other tongues, is fluent. He spent two decades in Peru, where he also holds citizenship (and where, it must be said, there is footage of him singing “Feliz Navidad” into a microphone at a Christmas party). And there’s that small matter that he is now the head of a global church of 1.4 billion souls.

So a new era begins for both the United States and the Catholic Church — an age-old hierarchy and a society that demands egalitarianism, or the appearance of it, from the people it looks up to. And at the intersection of those two principles sits Robert Prevost, Pope Leo XIV, an accomplished man in his own right but also an empty vessel into which broad swaths of humanity will pour their expectations — be they about eternity or simply the South Side of Chicago.

“Popes want to connect with people, and the church wants that as well. But the peril is that such familiarity breeds not so much contempt as disobedience,” Gibson says.

“The pope is not your friend. He is not going to sit down and have a beer with you,” he says. “If you think the pope is your pal, will you feel betrayed when he reminds you of your religious and moral duties, and chides you for failing to follow them?”

Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

It’s hard to not compare MSC Cruises’ World Class ships and its largest-ever offering, the MSC World America, to similarly massive ships sailed by Royal Caribbean. But while World America may look like its competitor’s ships, it has touches that set it apart.

The 22-deck, 6,764-passenger, 216,638-gross-ton ship arrived in April in PortMiami and has settled into year-round, seven-night Caribbean itineraries.

Just like Royal’s Icon and Oasis-class ships, World America is so big, that the line carves its space up into neighborhoods, although MSC calls them districts. They’re filled with nearly 40 restaurants, bars and lounges, so it feels like a little city at sea.

In fact, from behind, people would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between an Oasis-class ship from World America with both featuring a multi-deck, twisting dry slide as a centerpiece of an open-air deck.

One thing the brand does successfully, though, is lean into its European identity, especially the Italian flair of its founders.

“We’re not trying to be an American cruise line only for Americans,” said new MSC Cruises USA president Lynn Torrent. “We do have this European DNA and that’s real, and we need to own it and lean into it. But we need to have our American guests feel comfortable. So it really is a balance.”

So in the hallways, for instance, are historical black-and-white photos of space shuttle launches, but they were labeled as “Kennedy Space Centre.” Pool depths are in both meters and feet. Elevators are called lifts. A family area on the top decks is called “The Harbour.” But at least restrooms are no longer labeled “WC” for “water closet,” something one would find on earlier MSC ships.

Perhaps the most European thing is the bumper cars with the steering wheel on the right.

And while the ship may have many similarities, the interior leans into a modern design that has been a hallmark of the MSC ships before it. Mirrors are everywhere. And a lot of the ships sparkle. At the same time, a digital ceiling that stretches down the entire World Galleria entertainment district occasionally quite often displays a massive American flag.

Taking a closer look, travelers will find World America isn’t a clone. It has its own identity.

Here are some of the best features on board:

The Cliffhanger is a swing ride that juts out over the side of the ship 160 feet above the water on board the MSC World America. (Richard Tribou/Orlando Sentinel)

The Cliffhanger: Who knew a simple little swing could be such a thrill? A pair of two-seater swings juts out over the edge of the ship 160 feet above the water with just a simple T-bar keeping riders safe from sliding out.

“That’s it?” exclaimed Lindsay Bonfanti before holding on for the less-than-minute-long ride that drew a few more exclamations questioning her decision-making.

For those who love heights and a hit of adrenaline without putting in any work, this ride fits the bill.

More thrills to be found: The Family Aventura district has other fast-paced options including a ropes course with two small zip lines built in. One swings riders out over the chasm of the open-air aft section of the ship more than 11 decks below.

The small water park has five slides including a speedy drop slide that shoots riders down as if being dropped out bomb-bay doors. There’s also a pair of timed, side-by-side slides that allow for healthy competition and a tube ride with an option virtual reality headset that makes for a trippy, wet trip through the jungle. Just remember to not be laughing out loud with your mouth open when you hit the bottom.

Over in the sports court, the line breaks out bumper cars for some healthy head-on collisions.

But for those who don’t mind climbing into an open shark mouth, the Jaw Drop twisting slide is a welcome, free offering, the tube of which is transparent for much of the ride offering great views on the way down.

“Dirty Dancing in Concert” is the main theatrical production on board MSC World America. Performers put on a sneak peek at the ship’s naming ceremony at PortMiami on April 9. (Courtesy Ivan Sarfatti for MSC Cruises)

Dirty Dancing: It’s music and dancing that most people know. Baby gets put in a corner momentarily. The choreography is spot on. The dancers nail the lift. They had the time of their lives, and fans of the film will likely walk away from the short production in the main theater with a hit of nostalgia. The line also doubles down on the partnership by airing the film and putting on its own dance party themed to the 1980s hit film that itself used music from the summer of 1963.

Dialing into other nostalgic, but popular music, the line has a show playing the hits of Queen, marrying a live rock band with orchestral and aerialist accompaniment in the Panorama Lounge. Another main stage show “Hall of Fame” pulls from a variety of pop legends such as Beyonce and Justin Timberlake.

Jean-Philippe Chocolat & Café has a large selection of gelato flavors on board the MSC World America. (Richard Tribou/Orlando Sentinel)

So many flavors: MSC goes beyond simple vanilla, chocolate and swirl. Think gelato. Think multiple venues around the ship. Think massive selection. One of the best tempts travelers walking down the main World Galleria section of the ship within the Jean-Philippe Chocolat & Café venue, which also features hand-crafted chocolates, 14 flavors of macarons and a tidy little coffee bar tucked in the back. But 16 gelato and sorbet flavors from pistachio to hazelnut to mango to stracciatella. There’s some pretty rich vanilla and chocolate too.

When in doubt: Pizza. The ship has plenty of dining options including the first Eataly-branded Italian specialty restaurant and a Greek venue with fresh seafood called Paxos.

But perhaps the most satisfying dish on board is free. Freshly made pizza made in authentic stone ovens is a must-have from Luna Park Pizza & Burger, plus it’s open beyond normal dining hours, so a great place to wander into after a few drinks.

Or before dinner. Or between lunch and dinner.

The Gin Project makes custom gin drinks on board the MSC World America. (Richard Tribou/Orlando Sentinel)

Pour another one: Champagne bar: Check. Mixed drinks: Check: Hand-crafted beer. Check.

The line has 18 bars and lounges, but one of the most interesting is The Gin Project venue, taking up the upper level of a space shared with the Masters of the Sea pub, both of which share a view of a live music stage. The level of detail on the history of gin with old photos and antiques filling the walls amid the nooks and alcoves of the bar is similar to the feeling you get the first time you walk into a TGI Fridays and marvel at all the crazy stuff on the wall.

Plus coming up with your own libation from among 70 types of gins is a fun game of choose your own adventure. Start with an “earthy” or “fruity” or “grassy” gin for instance. Then choose a tonic style from among several options, and then finally the décor and flavor enhancements.

And it’s worth mentioning that coffee fans won’t find a Starbucks, but can get that caffeine high in a new, one would dare say, more adventurous way at the Coffee Emporium, pulling from Mediterranean beans and styles including French, Italian, Turkish and Moroccan.

Cheers to that.