Midday Roundup: ABC shuts out Fiorina; supporters cry foul

Left out. ABC is drawing criticism for excluding Carly Fiorina from Saturday night’s GOP presidential debate. At the start of campaign season, Fox devised a system to divide the then-17 candidates into two debates—one for the high-performers and one for the so-called undercards—for crowd control. Though time has winnowed the field to just nine candidates (eight if you don’t count Jim Gilmore, who got just 12 votes in the Iowa caucuses), ABC is still using polls to judge who gets to debate, and Fiorina didn’t make the cut. Her supporters, fellow Republicans, and even some of her rivals in the race say that’s not fair. “Americans deserve to hear from every candidate,” Ben Carson tweeted Thursday. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, agreed with Carson. So far, ABC is unrelenting despite accusations of bias and sexism. “I have been saying all along in this election the game is rigged, and now you see it in plain day,” Fiorina said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Bridging the divide. Pope Francis will meet next Friday with the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in what could be the most congenial encounter between leaders of the two churches in nearly a thousand years. The Great Schism between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches in the year 1,054 was a major fracture in Christendom that has never healed. The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest Orthodox church in the world. Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill I will meet at the airport in Havana, Cuba, and issue a joint declaration, The Washington Post reported. Both leaders share concerns for persecuted Christians in the Middle East, where some churches that pre-date the Great Schism still exist.

Stunted prayers. The Phoenix city council voted to replace the prayers at the start of its meetings with moments of silence to avoid having a Satanist group give a scheduled invocation. “If we don’t change what we’re doing, we will get sued and I don’t think that the city needs to spend $500,000 when we need to increase so many other things in this city,” councilwoman Thelda Williams said. After a heated debate, the council voted 5-4 to end the pre-meeting prayers.

ISIS expansion? Top national security aides are pressing the president to intervene militarily in Libya, where Islamic State (ISIS) is threatening to take over that country’s oil fields. This week in Rome, Secretary of State John Kerry told members of the coalition fighting ISIS that the terror group can’t be allowed to get its hands on Libya’s rich oil supplies. President Barack Obama, however, is telling aides to work harder on forming a unity government in Libya that can take on ISIS. U.S. special forces are advising friendly militias in eastern Libya, but large-scale military operations against ISIS there are not on the table.

WORLD Radio’s Jim Henry contributed to this report.