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.

By JENNIFER McDERMOTT

A coalition of state attorneys general filed a lawsuit Monday against President Donald Trump’s attempt to stop the development of wind energy.

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Attorneys general from 17 states and Washington, D.C., are challenging an executive order Trump signed during his first day in office, pausing approvals, permits and loans for all wind energy projects both onshore and offshore. They say Trump doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally shut down the permitting process, and he’s jeopardizing development of a power source critical to the states’ economic vitality, energy mix, public health and climate goals.

They’re asking a federal judge to declare the order unlawful and stop federal agencies from implementing it.

“This arbitrary and unnecessary directive threatens the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments, and it is delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the coalition, said in a statement.

Trump vowed during the campaign to end the offshore wind industry if he returned to the White House. His order said there were “alleged legal deficiencies underlying the federal government’s leasing and permitting” of wind projects, and it directed the Interior secretary to review wind leasing and permitting practices for federal waters and lands.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Massachusetts. One of the federal agencies named in it, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said it does not comment on litigation.

The Biden administration saw offshore wind as a climate change solution, setting national goals, holding lease sales and approving nearly a dozen commercial-scale projects. Trump is reversing those energy policies. He’s boosting fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal, which cause climate change, arguing it’s necessary for the U.S. to have the lowest-cost energy and electricity in the world.

The Trump administration took a more aggressive step against wind in April when it ordered the Norwegian company Equinor to halt construction on Empire Wind, a fully permitted project located southeast of Long Island, New York, that is about 30% complete. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said it appeared the Biden administration rushed the approval.

Equinor went through a seven-year permitting process before starting to build Empire Wind last year to provide power to 500,000 New York homes. Equinor is considering legal options, which would be separate from the complaint filed Monday. The Norwegian government owns a majority stake in Equinor.

Wind provides about 10% of the electricity generated in the United States, making it the nation’s largest source of renewable energy. The attorneys general argue that Trump’s order is at odds with years of bipartisan support for wind energy and contradicts his own declaration of a “national energy emergency,” which called for expanding domestic energy production.

The coalition includes Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Washington, D.C. They say they’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars collectively to develop wind energy and even more on upgrading transmission lines to bring wind energy to the electrical grid.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the executive order sows chaos, when businesses need clear regulations to effectively operate.

Large, ocean-based wind farms are the linchpin of state plans to shift to renewable energy, particularly in populous East Coast states with limited land. The nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm opened a year ago, a 12-turbine wind farm east of Montauk Point, New York. A smaller wind farm operates near Block Island in waters controlled by the state of Rhode Island.

Massachusetts has three offshore wind projects in various stages of development, include Vineyard Wind. The state has invested in offshore wind to ensure residents have access to well-paying green jobs and reliable, affordable energy, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell said.

The Trump administration has also suspended federal funding for floating offshore wind research in Maine and revoked a permit for a proposed offshore wind project in New Jersey.

Elsewhere, political leaders are trying to rapidly increase wind energy. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmerannounced a major investment in wind power in April while hosting an international summit on energy security. Nova Scotia plans to offer leases for five gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston said in Virginia last week at an Oceantic Network conference.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By MIKE STOBBE

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s motto is “ Make America Healthy Again,” but government cuts could make it harder to know if that’s happening.

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More than a dozen data-gathering programs that track deaths and disease appear to have been eliminated in the tornado of layoffs and proposed budget cuts rolled out in the Trump administration’s first 100 days.

The Associated Press examined draft and final budget proposals and spoke to more than a dozen current and former federal employees to determine the scope of the cuts to programs tracking basic facts about Americans’ health.

Among those terminated at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were experts tracking abortions, pregnancies, job-related injuries, lead poisonings, sexual violence and youth smoking, the AP found.

“If you don’t have staff, the program is gone,” said Patrick Breysse, who used to oversee the CDC’s environmental health programs.

Federal officials have not given a public accounting of specific surveillance programs that are being eliminated.

Instead, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman pointed the AP to a Trump administration budget proposal released Friday. It lacked specifics, but proposes to cut the CDC’s core budget by more than half and vows to focus CDC surveillance only on emerging and infectious diseases.

Kennedy has said some of the CDC’s other work will be moved to a yet-to-be-created agency, the Administration for a Healthy America. He also has said that the cuts are designed to get rid of waste at a department that has seen its budget grow in recent years.

“Unfortunately, this extra spending and staff has not improved our nation’s health as a country,” Kennedy wrote last month in The New York Post. “Instead, it has only created more waste, administrative bloat and duplication.”

Yet some health experts say the eliminated programs are not duplicative, and erasing them will leave Americans in the dark.

“If the U.S. is interested in making itself healthier again, how is it going to know, if it cancels the programs that helps us understand these diseases?” said Graham Mooney, a Johns Hopkins University public health historian.

The core of the nation’s health surveillance is done by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Relying on birth and death certificates, it generates information on birth rates, death trends and life expectancy. It also operates longstanding health surveys that provide basic data on obesity, asthma and other health issues.

The center has been barely touched in layoffs, and seems intact under current budget plans.

But many other efforts were targeted by the cuts, the AP found. Some examples:

Pregnancies and abortion

The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, which surveys women across the country, lost its entire staff — about 20 people.

It’s the most comprehensive collection of data on the health behaviors and outcomes before, during and after childbirth. Researchers have been using its data to investigate the nation’s maternal mortality problem.

Recent layoffs also wiped out the staffs collecting data on in vitro fertilizations and abortions.

Those cuts are especially surprising given that President Donald Trump said he wants to expand IVF access and that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook for his administration called for more abortion surveillance.

Lead poisoning

The CDC eliminated its program on lead poisoning in children, which helped local health departments — through funding and expertise — investigate lead poisoning clusters and find where risk is greatest.

Lead poisoning in kids typically stems from exposure to bits of old paint, contaminated dust or drinking water that passes through lead pipes. But the program’s staff also played an important role in the investigation of lead-tainted applesauce that affected 500 kids.

Last year, Milwaukee health officials became aware that peeling paint in aging local elementary schools was endangering kids. The city health department began working with CDC to test tens of thousands of students. That assistance stopped last month when the CDC’s lead program staff was terminated.

City officials are particularly concerned about losing expertise to help them track the long-term effects.

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” said Mike Totoraitis, the city’s health commissioner.

Environmental investigations

Also gone is the staff for the 23-year-old Environmental Public Health Tracking Program, which had information on concerns including possible cancer clusters and weather-related illnesses.

“The loss of that program is going to greatly diminish the ability to make linkages between what might be in the environment and what health might be affected by that,” Breysse said.

Transgender data

In some cases, it’s not a matter of staffers leaving, but rather the end of specific types of data collection.

Transgender status is no longer being recorded in health-tracking systems, including ones focused on violent deaths and on risky behaviors by kids.

Experts know transgender people are more likely to be victims of violence, but now “it’s going to be much more challenging to quantify the extent to which they are at higher risk,” said Thomas Simon, the recently retired senior director for scientific programs at the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention.

Violence

The staff and funding seems to have remained intact for a CDC data collection that provides insights into homicides, suicides and accidental deaths involving weapons.

But CDC violence-prevention programs that acted on that information were halted. So, too, was work on a system that collects hospital data on nonfatal injuries from causes such as shootings, crashes and drownings.

Also going away, apparently, is the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. The system is designed to pick up information that’s not found in law enforcement statistics. Health officials see that work as important, because not all sexual violence victims go to police.

Work injuries

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which tracks job-related illnesses and deaths and makes recommendations on how to prevent them, was gutted by the cuts.

Kennedy has said that 20% of the people laid off might be reinstated as the agency tries to correct mistakes.

That appeared to happen last month, when the American Federation of Government Employees said that NIOSH workers involved in a black lung disease program for coal miners had been temporarily called back.

But HHS officials did not answer questions about the reinstatement. The AFGE’s Micah Niemeier-Walsh later said the workers continued to have June termination dates and “we are concerned this is to give the appearance that the programs are still functioning, when effectively they are not.”

There’s been no talk of salvaging some other NIOSH programs, including one focused on workplace deaths in the oil and gas industries or a research project into how common hearing loss is in that industry.

Smoking and drugs

The HHS cuts eliminated the 17-member team responsible for the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, one of the main ways the government measures drug use.

Also axed were the CDC staff working on the National Youth Tobacco Survey.

There are other surveys that look at youth smoking and drug use, including the University of Michigan’s federally funded “Monitoring the Future” survey of schoolkids.

But the federal studies looked at both adults and adolescents, and provided insights into drug use by high school dropouts. The CDC also delved into specific vaping and tobacco products in the ways that other surveys don’t, and was a driver in the federal push to better regulate electronic cigarettes.

“There was overlap among the surveys, but each one had its own specific focus that the other ones didn’t cover,“ said Richard Miech, who leads the Michigan study.

Data modernization and predictions

Work to modernize data collection has been derailed. That includes an upgrade to a 22-year-old system that helps local public health departments track diseases and allows CDC to put together a national picture.

Another casualty was the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which tries to predict disease trends.

This image from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website shows a chart of measles cases in the United States as of May 1, 2025. (CDC via AP)

The center, created during the COVID-19 pandemic, was working on forecasting the current multi-state measles outbreak. That forecast hasn’t been published partly because of the layoffs, according to two CDC officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss it and fear retribution for speaking to the press.

Trump hasn’t always supported widespread testing of health problems.

In the spring of 2020, when COVID-19 diagnoses were exploding, the president groused that the nation’s ability to do more testing was making the U.S. look like it had a worse problem than other countries. He called testing “a double-edged sword.”

Mooney, the Johns Hopkins historian, wonders how interested the new administration is in reporting on health problems.

“You could think it’s deliberate,” he said. “If you keep people from knowing, they’re less likely to be concerned.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

“In a time when immigrants and workers are targeted by executive orders at both the city and federal levels, it is crucial that the New York City Council do everything in our power to support street vendors alongside the brick-and-mortar business that make our commercial corridors thrive.”

Street vendors near 7 train station at Junction Boulevard in Queens last year. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

New York City’s street vendors are an integral part of our city’s fabric, but thousands are still waiting to formally join the economy by obtaining a vending license. In a time when immigrants and workers are targeted by executive orders at both the city and federal levels, it is crucial that the New York City Council do everything in our power to support street vendors alongside the brick-and-mortar business that make our commercial corridors thrive.

At the city level, strengthening our street vending policy is one of the only ways we can make our city safer and more welcoming for immigrant New Yorkers. That’s why I’m proud to share that my bill to do just that is having a hearing in the City Council tomorrow—Tuesday, May 6. 

The reality is our street vending system is broken. Since the 1980s, New York City has issued a very small number of vending permits relative to demand, with more than 10,000 vendors on a now-closed waitlist. This proliferation of unlicensed vendors makes it more and more difficult to enforce the rules that are on the books, like health standards for food being sold, or spacing rules that keep our streets safe and clean. When permits are not made widely available, all New Yorkers suffer. 

RELATED READING: NYC Issued Over 10,000 Street Vendor Tickets, Confiscated Tons of Food in 2024

As a daughter and granddaughter of street vendors, I have made this issue a priority since taking office. My bill, Int. 431, would tackle our failed system head-on. The legislation would mandate that the city issue far more permits each year to bring existing vendors into the formal economy. It would pair that access with education so that vendors know their rights and responsibilities. In addition, my intention is to add new enforcement standards so that the rules for how a vendor can lose their license are clearly established. 

By taking a comprehensive approach to street vending, we can expand opportunity for our smallest businesses, establish a clear and fair enforcement system, and create thriving streets throughout our great city. 

If you feel strongly about the bill, I invite you to join us at tomorrow’s New York City Council hearing—Tuesday, May 6—on this critical legislation, either in person or by submitting a written testimony. As a member of the Council’s Progressive Caucus, I’m proud to have my bill as one of the Caucus’ priorities this term. With the support of and collaboration with my colleagues, I hope an amended version of Int. 431 will pass in this Council session. 

I hope you join me in raising your voice for all of our city’s workers: from the local auto shop, to your neighborhood bodega, to the street vendors striving for a better life.

Pierina Ana Sanchez is a member of the NYC Council representing the 14th District, which includes the Bronx neighborhoods of Kingsbridge, Fordham, University Heights and Mount Hope.

The post Opinion: A Balanced Approach to Street Vending appeared first on City Limits.