Good news!
We have just released v2.9 of python-telegram-bot, which includes the following features:
- Support for Channels
- If long-polling times out, an exception is thrown instead of blocking forever
- The Emoji class is now compatible to Python 3, natively
- Because of that, future is now a dependency for python-telegram-bot. Running pip install python-telegram-bot --upgrade will take care of it.

v2.9.1 was just released, what a wild ride!
This release fixes problems for bots with slow connections.

If you had problems with timing out on getUpdates, this release brings you the network_delay-parameter, which allows you to increase the time getUpdates waits for the data to be transmitted over the network.

To update to v2.9.1, run:
pip install python-telegram-bot --upgrade

The just released v2.9.2 fixes issue #98 (https://github.com/leandrotoledo/python-telegram-bot/issues/98)

We just released v3.0 with awesome new features!

There's the new Updater and Dispatcher classes that will hopefully make creating bots easier, faster and more reliable. Check the docs and examples on GitHub!
Code that worked on v2.9.2 should still work fine.

Update to v3.0 with:
pip install --upgrade python-telegram-bot

This example should get you started: https://github.com/leandrotoledo/python-telegram-bot/blob/master/examples/updater_simplebot.py