(File Photo of Police Lights)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Pittsburgh, PA) According to authorities, a man in Pittsburgh died after being electrocuted by live wires on Tuesday evening. This happened on St. Martin Street in the South Side Slopes in Pittsburgh. Sources told KDKA that a live wire fell on the man’s vehicle around 7 p.m., and he was killed trying to move it with a stick. The identity of the man has not yet been released.
(File Photo: Source for Photo: Pittsburgh Steelers fans cheer during the first round of the NFL football draft, Thursday, April 27, 2023, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Pittsburgh, PA) The 2026 NFL Draft will be in Pittsburgh on April 23rd through April 25th, 2026. Expectations are that the North Shore and Point State Park will host the Draft Experience Festival and the main stage where the next generation players of the NFL will be drafted. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro confirmed last year that the expectations for the 2026 NFL Draft could be exceeded as the biggest event being hosted in the Steel City.
(Photo Courtesy of the City of Aliquippa Police Department)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Aliquippa, PA) An uninvited animal was seen on Tuesday at an Aliquippa home on footage caught by a video camera there. According to Aliquippa Police, a bear was discovered in the 1800 block of Davidson Street and the Pennsylvania Game Commission has been notified about the bear. Police looked for the bear that day and it was not found. If you spot a bear in your area, police recommend that you pick up the phone and call 911 to be safe.
(File Photo of the PennDOT logo)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Harrisburg, PA) According to a release from PennDOT, PennDOT Secretary Mike Carroll and officials from AAA and the Harrisburg International Airport held an event Tuesday in Harrisburg for Real ID preparation. The deadline to get a Real ID in Pennsylvania is on May 7th and PennDOT centers across the state are holding Real ID Days the first two Mondays in May. The remaining times and locations for these Real ID Days can be found on the link below:
(File Photo of Gavel)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Pittsburgh, PA) Acting U.S. Attorney Troy Revetti announced Tuesday that two separate residents from Mexico pleaded guilty to a charge of illegal re-entry of a removed alien. The first was thirty-eight-year-old Dario Fortunato-Torres, who has been removed from the United States seven times between 2013 and 2017. Fortunato-Torres got sentenced on Monday and was arrested by immigration officials on November 19th, 2024. He has been in custody since then and will return to immigration custody. The second was thirty-four-year-old Juan Antonio Lopez-Mauricio, who got a sentence of sixty days in jail on Monday. Lopez-Mauricio was in the United States illegally on January 30th, 2025. According to Revetti, Lopez-Mauricio has been in custody since his January arrest and will remain detained pending his deportation from the United States.
(File Photo of the Walmart logo)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Center Township, PA) The Center Township Walmart will be remodeled in 2025. According to a release from Walmart, the company has invested more than $493 million to upgrade stores throughout Pennsylvania in the past five years. Walmart officials confirm that showcase merchandise displays and the signs will be updated in the store. The store in Center Township will also update its pharmacy and expand items, departments and online pickup and delivery.
(File Photo of Police Lights)
(Reported by Beaver County Radio News Correspondent Sandy Giordano)
(Hopewell Township, PA) An unidentified male pedestrian was hit by a vehicle on Tuesday on Broadhead Road. The patient, whose injury details are unknown, was transported by helicopter to Allegheny General Hospital. The Hopewell Township Volunteer Fire Department established a landing zone in the Hopewell Shopping Center. This is a developing story, and we will have updates as soon as they are available.
(File Photo of the Duquesne Light Company logo)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Beaver County, PA) Severe storms went through Western Pennsylvania yesterday and left people in Beaver County and other surrounding counties without power. The storms caused over a half a million people in Western Pennsylvania to lose power. According to a report from Duquesne Light Company, as of 10:30 Tuesday evening, over 240,000 people did not have power. That same evening, a report from West Penn Power confirms more than 260,000 people did not have power.
(File Photo: Source for Photo: FILE – Cardinals attend a Mass presided over by Cardinal Pietro Parolin in St. Peter’s Square, at the Vatican, on the second of nine days of mourning for Pope Francis on Sunday, April 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru, File)
(AP) Wanted: A holy man.
Job description: Leading the 1.4 billion-strong Catholic Church.
Location: Vatican City.
There are no official candidates for the papacy, but some cardinals are considered “papabile,” or possessing the characteristics necessary to become pope. After St. John Paul II broke the centurieslong Italian hold on the papacy in 1978, the field of contenders has broadened considerably.
When the cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel on May 7 to choose a successor to Pope Francis, the first pontiff from Latin America, they will be looking above all for a holy man who can guide the Catholic Church. Beyond that, they will weigh his administrative and pastoral experience and consider what the church needs today.
Here is a selection of possible contenders, in no particular order. The list will be updated as cardinals continue their closed-door, preconclave discussions.
Date of Birth: Jan. 17, 1955
Nationality: Italian
Position: Vatican secretary of state under Francis
Experience: Veteran Vatican diplomat
Made a cardinal by: Francis
The 70-year-old veteran diplomat was Francis’ secretary of state, essentially the Holy See’s prime minister.
Though associated closely with Francis’ pontificate, Parolin is much more demure in personality and diplomatic in his approach to leading than the Argentine Jesuit he served and he knows where the Catholic Church might need a course correction.
Parolin oversaw the Holy See’s controversial deal with China over bishop nominations and was involved — but not charged — in the Vatican’s botched investment in a London real estate venture that led to a 2021 trial of another cardinal and nine others. A former ambassador to Venezuela, Parolin knows the Latin American church well and played a key role in the 2014 U.S.-Cuba detente, which the Vatican helped facilitate.
If he were elected, he would return an Italian to the papacy after three successive outsiders: St. John Paul II (Poland), Pope Benedict XVI (Germany) and Francis (Argentina).
But Parolin has very little pastoral experience: He entered the seminary at age 14, four years after his father was killed in a car accident. After his 1980 ordination, he spent two years as a parish priest near his hometown in northern Italy, but then went to Rome to study and entered the Vatican diplomatic service, where he has remained ever since. He has served at Vatican embassies in Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela.
He is widely respected for his diplomatic finesse on some of the thorniest dossiers facing the Catholic Church. He has long been involved in the China file, and he played a hands-on role in the Holy See’s diplomatic rapprochement with Vietnam that resulted in an agreement to establish a resident Vatican representative in the country.
Parolin was also the Vatican’s point-person in its frustrated efforts to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. He has tried to make the church’s voice heard as the Trump administration began working to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“Let’s hope we can arrive at a peace that, in order to be solid, lasting, must be a just peace, must involve all the actors who are at stake and take into account the principles of international law and the UN declarations,” he said.
Parolin might find the geopolitical reality ushered in by the Trump administration somewhat unreceptive to the Holy See’s soft power.
— By Nicole Winfield in Vatican City
Date of Birth: June 21, 1957
Nationality: Filipino
Position: Pro-Prefect, Dicastery for Evangelization under Francis
Experience: Former archbishop of Manila, Philippines
Made a cardinal by: Benedict
Tagle, 67, is on many bookmakers’ lists to be the first Asian pope, a choice that would acknowledge a part of the world where the church is growing.
Francis brought the popular archbishop of Manila to Rome to head the Vatican’s missionary evangelization office, which serves the needs of the Catholic Church in much of Asia and Africa. His role took on greater weight when Francis reformed the Vatican bureaucracy. Tagle often cites his Chinese heritage — his maternal grandmother was part of a Chinese family that moved to the Philippines.
Though he has pastoral, Vatican and management experience — he headed the Vatican’s Caritas Internationalis federation of charity groups before coming to Rome permanently — Tagle would be on the young side to be elected pope, with cardinals perhaps preferring an older candidate whose papacy would be more limited.
Tagle is known as a good communicator and teacher — key attributes for a pope.
“The pope will have to do a lot of teaching, we’ll have to face the cameras all the time so if there will be a communicator pope, that’s very desirable,” said Leo Ocampo, a theology professor at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila.
That said, Tagle’s tenure at Caritas was not without controversy and some have questioned his management skills.
In 2022 , Francis ousted the Caritas management, including demoting Tagle. The Holy See said an outside investigation had found “real deficiencies” in management that had affected staff morale at the Caritas secretariat in Rome.
— By Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, and Nicole Winfield in Vatican City
Date of Birth: Jan. 24, 1960
Nationality: Congolese
Position: Archbishop of Kinshasa, Congo
Experience: President of the bishops conferences of Africa and Madagascar
Made a cardinal by: Francis
The 65-year-old Ambongo is one of Africa’s most outspoken Catholic leaders, heading the archdiocese that has the largest number of Catholics on the continent that seen as the future of the church.
He has been archbishop of Congo’s capital since 2018 and a cardinal since in 2019. Francis also appointed him to a group of advisers that was helping reorganize the Vatican bureaucracy.
In Congo and across Africa, Ambongo has been deeply committed to the Catholic orthodoxy and is seen as conservative.
In 2024, he signed a statement on behalf of the bishops conferences of Africa and Madagascar refusing to follow Francis’ declaration allowing priests to offer blessings to same-sex couples in what amounted to continent-wide dissent from a papal teaching. The rebuke crystalized both the African church’s line on LGBTQ+ outreach and Ambongo’s stature within the African hierarchy.
He has received praise from some in Congo for promoting interfaith tolerance, especially on a continent where religious divisions between Christians and Muslims are common.
“He is for the openness of the church to different cultures,” said Monsignor Donatien Nshole, secretary-general of the National Episcopal Conference of Congo, who has long worked with Ambongo.
An outspoken government critic, the cardinal is also known for his unwavering advocacy for social justice.
In a country with high poverty and hunger levels despite being rich in minerals, and where fighting by rebel groups has killed thousands and displaced millions in one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises, he frequently criticizes both government corruption and inaction, as well as the exploitation of the country’s natural resources by foreign powers.
“Congo is the plate from which everyone eats, except for our people,” he said last year during a speech at the Pontifical Antonianum University.
Ambongo’s criticism of authorities has drawn both public admiration and legal scrutiny. Last year, prosecutors ordered a judicial investigation of him after accusing him of “seditious behavior” over his criticism of the government’s handling of the conflict in eastern Congo.
— By Mark Banchereau in Dakar, Senegal
Date of Birth: Oct. 11, 1955
Nationality: Italian
Current position: Archbishop of Bologna, Italy, president of the Italian bishops conference
Previous position: Auxiliary bishop of Rome
Made a cardinal by: Francis
Zuppi, 69, came up as a street priest in the image of Francis, who promoted him quickly: first to archbishop of the wealthy archdiocese of Bologna in northern Italy in 2015, before bestowing the title of cardinal in 2019.
He is closely closely affiliated with the Sant’Egidio Community, a Rome-based Catholic charity that was influential under Francis, particularly in interfaith dialogue. Zuppi was part of Sant’Egidio’s team that helped negotiate the end of Mozambique’s civil war in the 1990s and was named Francis’ peace envoy for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
He traveled to Kyiv and Moscow after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appealed to the Holy See for help in winning the release of 19,000 Ukrainian children taken from their families and brought to Russia during the war. The mission also took him to China and the United States.
After making him a cardinal, Francis made clear he wanted him in charge of Italy’s bishops, a sign of his admiration for the prelate who, like Francis, is known as a “street priest” — someone who prioritizes ministering to poor and homeless people and refugees.
Zuppi would be a candidate in Francis’ tradition of ministering to those on the margins, although his relative youth would count against him for cardinals seeking a short papacy.
In a sign of his progressive leanings, Zuppi wrote the introduction to the Italian edition of “Building a Bridge,” by the Rev. James Martin, an American Jesuit, about the church’s need to improve its outreach to the LGBTQ+ community.
Zuppi wrote that building bridges with the community was a “difficult process, still unfolding.” He recognized that “doing nothing, on the other hand, risks causing a great deal of suffering, makes people feel lonely, and often leads to the adoption of positions that are both contrasting and extreme.”
Zuppi’s family also has strong institutional ties: His father worked for the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, and his mother was the niece of Cardinal Carlo Confalonieri, dean of the College of Cardinals in the 1960s and 1970s.
— By Colleen Barry in Vatican City
Date of Birth: June 25, 1952
Nationality: Hungarian
Position: Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, Hungary
Past experience: Twice elected head of the umbrella group of European bishops conferences
Made a cardinal by: John Paul
Known by his peers as a serious theologian, scholar and educator, Erdő, 72, is a leading contender among conservatives. He has served as the archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest since 2002 and was made a cardinal by John Paul the following year. He has participated in two conclaves, in 2005 and 2013, for the selection of Benedict and Francis.
Holding doctorates in theology and canon law, Erdő, speaks six languages, is a proponent of doctrinal orthodoxy, and champions the church’s positions on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
Erdő opposes same-sex unions, and has also resisted suggestions that Catholics who remarry after divorce be able to receive communion. He stated in 2015 that divorced Catholics should only be permitted communion if they remain sexually abstinent in their new marriage.
An advocate for traditional family structures, he helped organize Francis’ 2014 and 2015 Vatican meetings on the family.
From 2006 to 2016, Erdő served as president of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences, helping to foster collaboration among Catholic bishops across Europe and to address contemporary issues facing the church on the continent.
While careful to avoid taking part in Hungary’s often tumultuous political life, Erdő has maintained a close relationship with the country’s rightist populist government, which provides generous subsidies to Christian churches.
He has been reluctant to take positions on several of the government’s policies that divided society in Hungary such as public campaigns that villainized migrants and refugees and laws that eroded the rights of LGBTQ+ communities.
When hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers entered Europe in 2015 fleeing war and deprivation in the Middle East and Africa, Erdő emphasized that the church had a Christian duty to provide humanitarian assistance to those in need, but stopped short of the full-throated advocacy for migrants that was one of Francis’ top priorities.
— By Justin Spike in Budapest, Hungary
The following school districts and businesses are either delayed or canceled today. (The list will be updated throughout the morning.)
Wednesday, April 30th, 2025
| School or Organization | Cancellation or Delay ( If blank no cancellation or delay reported) |
| Adelphoi Education in Rochester | |
| Aliquippa Area School District | Closed Wednesday |
| Ambridge Area School District | |
| Avonworth Area School District | 2 hour delay Wednesday |
| Baden Academy Charter | |
| Beaver Area School District | Closed Wednesday |
| Bethel Christian-Racoon Twp. | 2 hour delay Wednesday |
| Beaver County CTC | |
| Beaver County Christian School | |
| Beaver Valley Montessori School | |
| Big Beaver Falls Area School District | Big Beaver Elementary Only is Closed Wednesday from the district and the after school program of that school is closed Wednesday as well |
| Blackhawk Area School District | |
| Butler County Community College (All Locations) | |
| Center at the Mall in Monaca | |
| Central Valley School District | Closed Wednesday |
| CCBC | |
| CCBC School of Aviation Sciences | |
| Chippewa Alliance Church | |
| Cornell School District | 2 hour delay Wednesday |
| Early Years (All Locations) | |
| Eden Christian Academy | |
| Education Center at Watson (Sewickley) | 2 hour delay Wednesday |
| Ellwood City Area School District | |
| Freedom Area School District | |
| Head Start of Beaver County -All Centers | |
| Heart Prints Center for Early Education in Cranberry Township | |
| Hope Academy- Conway | |
| Hopewell Area School District | Closed Wednesday- Flexible Instruction Day |
| Life Family Pre-School | |
| Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School | Closed Wednesday- Flexible Instruction Day |
| Mc Guire Memorial EOC | |
| Mc Guire Memorial School | |
| Midland Borough School District | |
| Montour Area School District | |
| Moon Area School District | 2 hour delay Wednesday |
| Most Sacred Heart of Jesus Pre-school (Moon Twp.) | |
| My Family Preschool in New Brighton | |
| New Brighton Area School District | |
| New Horizon-Beaver County | |
| North Catholic High School | |
| Our Lady of Fatima-Hopewell | Closed Wednesday- Flexible Instruction Day |
| Our Lady of the Sacred Heart | Closed Wednesday- Flexible Instruction Day |
| Parkway West CTC | |
| Penn State-Beaver | |
| Provident Charter School West | |
| Quaker Valley School District | 2 hour delay Wednesday |
| Riverside Area School District (Beaver County) | |
| Road to Emmaus Baptist Church in Beaver | |
| Rochester Area School District | |
| Seneca Valley School District | |
| Sewickley Academy | 2 hour delay Wednesday |
| South Side Beaver School District (Hookstown) | Closed Wednesday |
| Sto-Rox School District | 2 hour delay Wednesday |
| St. James School (Sewickley) | |
| St. Kilian Parish School in Cranberry | |
| St. Monica Catholic Academy (Beaver Falls) | |
| St. Peter & Paul (Beaver) | |
| St. Stephen’s Lutheran Academy in Zelienople | |
| Vanport VFD | |
| West Allegheny | |
| Western Beaver | |
| Zelienople/Evans City Meals on Wheels in Zelienople | |
| Zelienople Preschool |