Midday Roundup: A pope enamored with humility

A humble man. Coverage of Pope Francis’ first day in office continues to flood the internet and the airwaves. The word used most often to describe the new pontiff: humility. He declined to use the official papal limousine for his first trip away from the Sistine Chapel, boarding a bus with several cardinals instead. He also returned to the Vatican hotel where he spent the early part of the week to pick up his luggage and pay his bill. Catholics (and the rest of the world) seem smitten. Most people are brushing aside decades-old accusations that the former archbishop of Buenos Aires failed to confront a military junta accused of killing thousands of Argentines between 1976 and 1983.

Gun battle. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill banning almost 160 assault-style weapons, a proposal unlikely to gain much traction in the full Senate. This is the fourth gun control measure the committee has passed in the last week. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., tangled over the measure’s constitutionality during the heated debate.

Discovery confirmed. Scientists are even more confident than they were last year that they have found the Higgs boson particle. Here’s how The Wall Street Journal describes the importance of the discovery: “The Higgs boson is crucial to the current view of how the universe is structured because it is linked to a mechanism that confers mass to elementary particles. It thus helps to explain the presence of stars, planets and other cosmic bodies.”

Power outage. Another Carnival cruise ship is experiencing power problems far from home. The Carnival Dream, sailing around the Caribbean island of St. Maarten with 3,646 passengers, lost power for several hours Wednesday night. Toilets and elevators stopped working, but the ship never lost complete power. The incident is a public relations headache for the company, coming just a month after another ship foundered in the Gulf of Mexico and had to be towed back to port—a weeklong ordeal chronicled daily on cable news outlets.

Another financial bubble? The Dow Jones Industrial Average just keeps on rising. Today marked the 10th day of stock market increases, and if the market closes up again this afternoon, it could near record highs. Positive jobless numbers drove today’s hike, but some economists say the market is overheated and prime for a fall.