By ED WHITE

President Donald Trump wants to convert Alcatraz back into a federal prison, decades after the California island fortress was converted into a U.S. tourist destination because it had become too costly to house America’s worst criminals.

The prison off the coast of San Francisco is where the government sent notorious gangsters Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly as well as lesser-known men who were considered too dangerous to lock up elsewhere.

Circled by herons and gulls and often shrouded in fog, Alcatraz has been the setting for movies featuring Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Clint Eastwood.

Trump says Alcatraz, now part of the National Park Service, suddenly is needed to house America’s “most ruthless and violent” criminals.

“When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Trump said Sunday on his Truth Social site.

What is Alcatraz?

Alcatraz is in San Francisco Bay off the coast of San Francisco and visible from the Golden Gate Bridge. It is best known for its years as a federal prison, from 1934-63, but its history is much longer.

President Millard Fillmore in 1850 declared the island for public purposes, according to the park service, and it soon became a military site. Confederates were housed there during the Civil War.

By the 1930s, the government decided that it needed a place to hold the worst criminals, and Alcatraz became the choice for a prison.

“A remote site was sought, one that would prohibit constant communication with the outside world by those confined within its walls,” the park service said. “Although land in Alaska was being considered, the availability of Alcatraz Island conveniently coincided with the government’s perceived need for a high security prison.”

Why did it close?

The remoteness eventually made it impractical. Everything from food to fuel had to arrive by boat.

“The island had no source of fresh water,” according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, “so nearly one million gallons of water had to be barged to the island each week.”

The cost to house someone there in 1959 was $10.10 a day compared with $3 at a federal prison in Atlanta, the government said. It was cheaper to build a new prison from scratch.

Why is Alcatraz notorious?

Despite the location, many prisoners tried to get out: 36 men attempted 14 separate escapes into the bay, according to the FBI. Nearly all were caught or didn’t survive the cold water and swift current.

“Escape from Alcatraz,” a 1979 movie starring Eastwood, told the story of John Anglin, his brother Clarence and Frank Morris, who all escaped in 1962, leaving behind handmade plaster heads with real hair in their beds to fool guards.

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“For the 17 years we worked on the case, no credible evidence emerged to suggest the men were still alive, either in the U.S. or overseas,” the FBI said.

“The Rock,” a 1996 fictional thriller with Connery and Cage, centers on an effort to rescue hostages from rogue Marines on Alcatraz.

A national park

Alcatraz became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and was opened to the public in 1973, a decade after it was closed as a prison.

The park service says the island gets more than 1 million visitors a year who arrive by ferry. A ticket for an adult costs $47.95, and visitors can see the cells where prisoners were held.

In 1969, a group of Native Americans, mostly college students, claimed to have a right to Alcatraz and began an occupation that lasted for 19 months. It ended in 1971 when federal authorities intervened.

“The underlying goals of the Indians on Alcatraz were to awaken the American public to the reality of the plight of the first Americans and to assert the need for Indian self-determination,” late historian Troy Johnson wrote.

By MARIA GRAZIA MURRU and SYLVIA HUI

ROME (AP) — Next week’s conclave to elect the successor to Pope Francis as leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics is a solemn affair steeped in centuries-old traditions.

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But far from the Sistine Chapel where cloistered cardinals will cast votes, people are placing bets on who will be chosen as the next pope. From cash bets on websites to online games modeled after fantasy football leagues and casual wagers among friends and families, the popularity of guessing and gambling on the future of the papacy is increasing worldwide, experts and participants say.

It’s even topped the Europa League soccer tournament and Formula One drivers’ championship, said Sam Eaton, U.K. manager for Oddschecker, a leading online platform analyzing odds across sports, events and other betting markets.

“There’s a huge level of interest globally,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve had a market like this where we’ve had so many countries interested in seeing odds.”

Around the world, thousands of bets on the next pope

Hundreds of thousands of people from some 140 countries have visited Oddschecker to review each cardinal’s chances of becoming the next pope, Eaton said. He noted special eagerness in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States.

Cardinals attend a mass on the fifth of nine days of mourning for late Pope Francis, in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, Wednesday, April 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

In the U.K., about 30,000 pounds (almost $40,000) have been wagered with one leading online betting platform as of this week, Eaton said – a far cry from 1.2 million pounds on the singing contest Eurovision but still noteworthy as a trend, with the conclave days away.

“Betting on the next pope is definitely a niche market in the grand scheme of things, but it generates global interest,” said Lee Phelps, a spokesman for William Hill, one of the U.K.’s biggest bookmakers.

“Since April 21, we’ve taken thousands of bets, and it’s the busiest of all our non-sports betting markets,” said Phelps, who expects a surge in interest once the conclave begins Wednesday.

Betting on elections, papal conclaves and all manner of global events is almost a tradition of its own in the U.K., but such betting is not legal in the United States. BetMGM, one of the world’s top sports-betting companies, said it would not have any bets up.

But Eaton noted that in the unregulated, illegal space, one of the biggest sites has $10 million wagered so far in pope bets.

Fantasy “teams” of cardinals

In Italy, betting on the papal election — and all religious events — is forbidden.

Some people in Rome are making friendly, informal wagers — the equivalent of $20 on a favorite cardinal, with the loser pledging to host a dinner or buy a pizza night out.

Others are turning to an online game called Fantapapa, or Fantasy Pope, which mimics popular fantasy football and soccer leagues. More than 60,000 people are playing, each choosing 11 cardinals – as if for a soccer team – whom they believe have the best shot at becoming the next pope.

Cardinals nattend a mass on the sixth of nine days of mourning for late Pope Francis, in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, Thursday, May 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

They also draft the top contender, or captain. As with online wagers, the No. 1 choice for fantasy players has been Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, closely followed by Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle.

“It’s a really fun game to play with friends and have a laugh,” Italian student Federico La Rocca, 23, said. “Initially my dad sent it to me ironically, but now that it’s going to be the conclave, I decided to have a go and try it.”

La Rocca said he chose Tagle because “he looks like a nice guy and fun person.”

Players’ selections determine the number of points they rake in. But what’s the jackpot?

“Eternal glory,” joked Mauro Vanetti, who created the game when Francis was hospitalized earlier this year.

Vanetti said he and his co-founder are against gambling, but they wanted to create something fun around the event.

“It seems like in Italy there’s a certain inquisitiveness about the mechanisms of the Catholic hierarchy, but it’s a critical curiosity, a sarcastic and playful curiosity, so we were interested in this jesting spirit for such a solemn event,” Vanetti said. “In some ways it deflates the sacredness, in a nonaggressive way.”

Some concerns about betting on a solemn event

Beyond simply picking who the next pope will be, players and gamblers also can guess how many tries it will take the cardinals to choose the leader, which day of the week he’ll be elected, what new name he will decide on, or where his priorities will land on the progressive-conservative scale.

Pilgrims arrive to visit St. Peter’s Basilica on the seventh of nine days of mourning for late Pope Francis, at the Vatican, Friday, May 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

While the game and some of the bets have a novel or fun nature, anti-gambling advocates have raised overall concerns about legal gaming and the growing popularity of wagering on all manner of events.

A study published last fall found that 10% of young men in the U.S. show behavior that indicates a gambling problem, which is a rising concern in other parts of the world, too.

And for gambling around the papacy in general, some have raised religious concerns. Catholic teaching doesn’t go so far as to call games of chance or wagers sinful, but its Catechism warns that “the passion for gambling risks becoming an enslavement.”

It says gambling becomes “morally unacceptable” if it gravely affects a person’s livelihood.

Hui reported from London. AP writers Giovanna Dell’Orto in Rome and Mark Anderson in Las Vegas contributed.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

By REBECCA BOONE and AMANDA SEITZ

Attorneys general in 19 states and Washington, D.C., are challenging cuts to the U.S. Health and Human Services agency, saying the Trump administration’s massive restructuring has destroyed life-saving programs and left states to pick up the bill for mounting health crises.

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The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Washington D.C. on Monday, New York Attorney General Letitia James said. The attorneys general from Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia signed onto the complaint.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. restructured the agency in March, eliminating more than 10,000 employees and collapsing 28 agencies under the sprawling HHS umbrella into 15, the attorneys general said. An additional 10,000 employees had already been let go by President Donald Trump’s administration, according to the lawsuit, and combined the cuts stripped 25% of the HHS workforce.

“In its first three months, Secretary Kennedy and this administration deprived HHS of the resources necessary to do its job,” the attorneys general wrote.

Kennedy has said he is seeking to streamline the nation’s public health agencies and reduce redundancies across them with the layoffs. The cuts were made as part of a directive the administration has dubbed, “ Make America Healthy Again.”

HHS is one of the government’s costliest federal agencies, with an annual budget of about $1.7 trillion that is mostly spent on health care coverage for millions of people enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid.

The cuts have resulted in laboratories having limited testing for some infectious diseases, the federal government not tracking cancer risks among U.S. firefighters, early childhood learning programs left unsure of future funds and programs aimed at monitoring cancer and maternal health closing, the attorneys general say. Cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also have hampered states’ ability to respond to one of the largest measles outbreaks in recent years, the lawsuit says.

“This chaos and abandonment of the Department’s core functions was not an unintended side effect, but rather the intended result,” of the “MAHA Directive,” they said. They want a judge to vacate the directive because they say the administration can’t unilaterally eliminate programs and funding that have been created by Congress.

The restructuring eliminated the entire team of people who maintain the federal poverty guidelines used by states to determine whether residents are eligible for Medicaid, nutrition assistance and other programs. A tobacco prevention agency was gutted. Staff losses also were significant at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The Trump administration is already facing other legal challenges over cuts to public health agencies and research organizations. A coalition of 23 states filed a federal lawsuit in Rhode Island last month over the administration’s decision to cut $11 billion in federal funds for COVID-19 initiatives and various public health projects across the country.

Boone reported from Boise, Idaho and Seitz reported from Washington, D.C.

By NICOLE WINFIELD

ROME (AP) — Rome is bustling with jasmine blooming and tourists swarming. But behind closed doors, these are the days of dinner parties, coffee klatches and private meetings as cardinals in town to elect a successor to Pope Francis suss out who among them has the stuff to be next.

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It was in this period of pre-conclave huddling in March of 2013 that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the retired archbishop of Westminster, and other reform-minded Europeans began pushing the candidacy of an Argentine Jesuit named Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Their dinner table lobbying worked and Pope Francis won on the fifth ballot.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols may have inherited Murphy-O’Connor’s position as archbishop of Westminster. But he’s not taking on the job as the front-man papal lobbyist in these days of canvassing of cardinals to try to identify who among them should be the next pope.

“We’re of quite different styles,” Nichols said Friday, chuckling during an interview in the Venerable English College, the storied British seminary in downtown Rome where Nichols studied in the 1960s. “Cardinal Cormac would love to be at the center of the party. I’m a little more reserved than that and a little bit more introverted.”

Nevertheless, Nichols, 79, provided an insider’s view of what’s going on among his fellow cardinal-electors, between meals of Rome’s famous carbonara — as they get to know one another. They all descended on Rome to bid farewell to the pope and are now meeting informally before the start of the May 7 conclave.

Nichols says he is spending these days before he and his fellow cardinals are sequestered listening. The routine calls for cardinals to meet each morning in a Vatican auditorium to discuss the needs of the Catholic Church and the type of person who can lead it. These meetings are open to all cardinals, including those over 80, while the conclave itself in the Sistine Chapel is limited to cardinals who haven’t yet reached 80.

With the exception of an afternoon Mass — part of the nine days of official mourning for Francis — the rest of the day is free. Cardinals have been seen around town taking walks or eating out, trying to remain incognito.

‘Not a boys’ brigade that marches in step’

Nichols said a picture of the future pope is beginning to emerge, at least in his mind, as cardinals look back at Francis’ 12-year pontificate and see where to go from here.

“I suppose we’re looking for somebody who even in their manner not only expresses the depth of the faith, but also its openness as well,” said Nichols.

Pope Benedict XVI named Nichols archbishop of Westminster in 2009, but he didn’t become a cardinal until 2014, when Francis tapped him in his first batch of cardinals. Francis went on to name Nichols as a member of several important Vatican offices, including the powerful dicastery for bishops, which vets bishop nominations around the world.

“My experience so far, to be quite honest with you, is there’s a lot of attentive listening,” Nichols said. “That’s listening to the people who might have an idea today of who they think is the best candidate, and I wouldn’t be surprised if by Monday they might have changed their mind.”

Nichols said the picture that is emerging is of seeing Francis’ pontificate in continuity with the more doctrinaire papacies of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and of appreciating the multicultural reality of the Catholic Church today. Francis greatly expanded the College of Cardinals to include cardinals from far-flung places like Tonga and Mongolia, rather than the traditional centers of European Catholicism.

Yes, divisions and disagreements have been aired. “But I can never remember a time when Catholics all agreed about everything,” Nichols said.

“We’re not a boys’ brigade that marches in step.” But he said he sensed that cardinals believe Francis’ reforming papacy and radical call to prioritize the poor and marginalized, to care for the planet and all its people, needed further consolidating with another papacy.

“There’s a sense that the initiatives that this man of such originality took, they probably do need rooting a bit more to give them that stability and evident continuity,” Nichols said. “So that these aren’t just the ideas of one person, one charismatic person, but they are actually consistently part of how the church reflects on humanity, our own humanity and our world.”

‘Team Bergoglio’

In his book “The Great Reformer,” Francis’ biographer Austen Ivereigh described the 2013 conclave and how Nichols’ predecessor, Murphy-O’Connor and other reform-minded Europeans seized the opportunity to push Bergoglio after it was clear the Italians were fighting among themselves over the Italian candidate.

“Team Bergoglio,” as these reform-minded cardinals came to be known, had tried to talk up Bergoglio in the 2005 conclave, but failed to get their man through after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s momentum grew and Bergoglio bowed out.

In 2013, with many too old to vote in the conclave itself, “Team Bergoglio” talked up the Argentine at dinner parties around Rome in the days before the conclave. The aim was to ensure Bergoglio could secure at least 25 votes on the first ballot to establish himself as a serious candidate, the book said.

“The Great Reformer” recounts a dinner party at the North American College, the U.S. seminary in Rome, on March 5, 2013 to which Murphy-O’Connor and Australian Cardinal George Pell were invited and where the British cardinal talked up the qualities of a possible first Latin American pope.

“He held a number of these dinners, and I think there were a few of them involved, a few who had grown convinced that Bergoglio was what the church needed,” Ivereigh said Friday.

Nichols doesn’t have any such calculations or preferred candidate, at least that he is willing to share.

“For me, it’s no good going into a conclave thinking it’s like a political election and I want my side to win. I’m not going to do that,” he said. “I’m going to go in certainly with my own thoughts but ready to change them, to listen and maybe try and persuade others to change theirs too.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.