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