OBITUARY: Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88

OBITUARY: Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88
Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025. (AP)
Short Url
Updated 21 April 2025
Follow

OBITUARY: Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88

OBITUARY: Pope Francis, first Latin American pontiff who ministered with a charming, humble style, dies at 88
  • Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025

VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis, history’s first Latin American pontiff who charmed the world with his humble style and concern for the poor but alienated conservatives with critiques of capitalism and climate change, has died Monday. He was 88.
“At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the home of the Father. His entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of his Church,″ Cardinal Kevin Ferrell, the Vatican camerlengo, said in an announcement.
Francis, who suffered from chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14, 2025, for a respiratory crisis that developed into double pneumonia. He spent 38 days there, the longest hospitalization of his 12-year papacy.
From his first greeting as pope — a remarkably normal “Buonasera” (“Good evening”) — to his embrace of refugees and the downtrodden, Francis signaled a very different tone for the papacy, stressing humility over hubris for a Catholic Church beset by scandal and accusations of indifference.

GALLERY: Pope Francis: The world mourns
After that rainy night on March 13, 2013, the Argentine-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio brought a breath of fresh air into a 2,000-year-old institution that had seen its influence wane during the troubled tenure of Pope Benedict XVI, whose surprise resignation led to Francis’ election.
Francis, the crowd-loving, globe-trotting pope of the peripheries, navigated the unprecedented reality of leading a universal religion through the coronavirus pandemic from a locked-down Vatican City.
He implored the world to use COVID-19 as an opportunity to rethink the economic and political framework that he said had turned rich against poor.
“We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented,” Francis told an empty St. Peter’s Square in March 2020. But he also stressed the pandemic showed the need for “all of us to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.”
Reforming the Vatican
Stressing mercy, Francis changed the church’s position on the death penalty, calling it inadmissible in all circumstances. He also declared the possession of nuclear weapons, not just their use, was “immoral.”
In other firsts, he approved an agreement with China over bishop nominations that had vexed the Vatican for decades, met the Russian patriarch and charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.
He reaffirmed the all-male, celibate priesthood and upheld the church’s opposition to abortion, equating it to “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”
Roles for women
But he added women to important decision-making roles and allowed them to serve as lectors and acolytes in parishes. He let women vote alongside bishops in periodic Vatican meetings, following longstanding complaints that women do much of the church’s work but are barred from power.
Sister Nathalie Becquart, whom Francis named to one of the highest Vatican jobs, said his legacy was a vision of a church where men and women existed in a relationship of reciprocity and respect.
“It was about shifting a pattern of domination — from human being to the creation, from men to women — to a pattern of cooperation,” said Becquart, the first woman to hold a voting position in a Vatican synod.
The church as refuge
While Francis did not allow women to be ordained, the voting reform was part of a revolutionary change in emphasizing what the church should be: a refuge for everyone — “todos, todos, todos” (“everyone, everyone, everyone”) — not for the privileged few. Migrants, the poor, prisoners and outcasts were invited to his table far more than presidents or powerful CEOs.
“For Pope Francis, it was always to extend the arms of the church to embrace all people, not to exclude anyone,” said Cardinal Kevin Farrell, whom Francis named as camerlengo, taking charge after a pontiff’s death or retirement.
Francis demanded his bishops apply mercy and charity to their flocks, pressed the world to protect God’s creation from climate disaster, and challenged countries to welcome those fleeing war, poverty and oppression.
After visiting Mexico in 2016, Francis said of then-US presidential candidate Donald Trump that anyone building a wall to keep migrants out “is not Christian.”
While progressives were thrilled with Francis’ radical focus on Jesus’ message of mercy and inclusion, it troubled conservatives who feared he watered down Catholic teaching and threatened the very Christian identity of the West. Some even called him a heretic.
A few cardinals openly challenged him. Francis usually responded with his typical answer to conflict: silence.
He made it easier for married Catholics to get an annulment, allowed priests to absolve women who had had abortions and decreed that priests could bless same-sex couples. He opened debate on issues like homosexuality and divorce, giving pastors wiggle room to discern how to accompany their flocks, rather than handing them strict rules to apply.
St. Francis of Assisi as a model
Francis lived in the Vatican hotel instead of the Apostolic Palace, wore his old orthotic shoes and not the red loafers of the papacy, and rode in compact cars. It wasn’t a gimmick.
“I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful,” he told a Jesuit journal in 2013. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle.”
If becoming the first Latin American and first Jesuit pope wasn’t enough, Francis was also the first to name himself after St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th century friar known for personal simplicity, a message of peace, and care for nature and society’s outcasts.
Francis sought out the unemployed, the sick, the disabled and the homeless. He formally apologized to Indigenous peoples for the crimes of the church from colonial times onward.
And he himself suffered: He had part of his colon removed in 2021, then needed more surgery in 2023 to repair a painful hernia and remove intestinal scar tissue. Starting in 2022 he regularly used a wheelchair or cane because of bad knees, and endured bouts of bronchitis.
He went to society’s fringes to minister with mercy: caressing the grossly deformed head of a man in St. Peter’s Square, kissing the tattoo of a Holocaust survivor, or inviting Argentina’s garbage scavengers to join him onstage in Rio de Janeiro.
“We have always been marginalized, but Pope Francis always helped us,” said Coqui Vargas, a transgender woman whose Roman community forged a unique relationship with Francis during the pandemic.
His first trip as pope was to the island of Lampedusa, then the epicenter of Europe’s migration crisis. He consistently chose to visit poor countries where Christians were often persecuted minorities, rather than the centers of global Catholicism.
Friend and fellow Argentine, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, said his concern for the poor and disenfranchised was based on the Beatitudes — the eight blessings Jesus delivered in the Sermon on the Mount for the meek, the merciful, the poor in spirit and others.
“Why are the Beatitudes the program of this pontificate? Because they were the basis of Jesus Christ’s own program,” Sánchez said.
Missteps on sexual abuse scandal
But more than a year passed before Francis met with survivors of priestly sexual abuse, and victims’ groups initially questioned whether he really understood the scope of the problem.
Francis did create a sex abuse commission to advise the church on best practices, but it lost its influence after a few years and its recommendation of a tribunal to judge bishops who covered up for predator priests went nowhere.
And then came the greatest crisis of his papacy, when he discredited Chilean abuse victims in 2018 and stood by a controversial bishop linked to their abuser. Realizing his error, Francis invited the victims to the Vatican for a personal mea culpa and summoned the leadership of the Chilean church to resign en masse.
As that crisis concluded, a new one erupted over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington and a counselor to three popes.
Francis had actually moved swiftly to sideline McCarrick amid an accusation he had molested a teenage altar boy in the 1970s. But Francis nevertheless was accused by the Vatican’s one-time US ambassador of having rehabilitated McCarrick early in his papacy.
Francis eventually defrocked McCarrick after a Vatican investigation determined he sexually abused adults as well as minors. He changed church law to remove the pontifical secret surrounding abuse cases and enacted procedures to investigate bishops who abused or covered for their pedophile priests, seeking to end impunity for the hierarchy.
“He sincerely wanted to do something and he transmitted that,” said Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean abuse survivor Francis discredited who later developed a close friendship with the pontiff.
A change from Benedict
The road to Francis’ 2013 election was paved by Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to resign and retire — the first in 600 years — and it created the unprecedented reality of two popes living in the Vatican.
Francis didn’t shy from Benedict’s potentially uncomfortable shadow. He embraced him as an elder statesman and adviser, coaxing him out of his cloistered retirement to participate in the public life of the church.
“It’s like having your grandfather in the house, a wise grandfather,” Francis said.
Francis praised Benedict by saying he “opened the door” to others following suit, fueling speculation that Francis also might retire. But after Benedict’s death on Dec. 31, 2022, he asserted that in principle the papacy is a job for life.
Francis’ looser liturgical style and pastoral priorities made clear he and the German-born theologian came from very different religious traditions, and Francis directly overturned several decisions of his predecessor.
He made sure Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, a hero to the liberation theology movement in Latin America, was canonized after his case languished under Benedict over concerns about the credo’s Marxist bent.
Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass that Benedict had relaxed, arguing the spread of the Tridentine Rite was divisive. The move riled Francis’ traditionalist critics and opened sustained conflict between right-wing Catholics, particularly in the US, and the Argentine pope.
Conservatives oppose Francis
By then, conservatives had already turned away from Francis, betrayed after he opened debate on allowing remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments if they didn’t get an annulment — a church ruling that their first marriage was invalid.
“We don’t like this pope,” headlined Italy’s conservative daily Il Foglio a few months into the papacy, reflecting the unease of the small but vocal traditionalist Catholic movement that was coddled under Benedict.
Those same critics amplified their complaints after Francis’ approved church blessings for same-sex couples, and a controversial accord with China over nominating bishops.
Its details were never released, but conservative critics bashed it as a sellout to communist China, while the Vatican defended it as the best deal it could get with Beijing.
US Cardinal Raymond Burke, a figurehead in the anti-Francis opposition, said the church had become “like a ship without a rudder.”
Burke waged his opposition campaign for years, starting when Francis fired him as the Vatican’s supreme court justice and culminating with his vocal opposition to Francis’ 2023 synod on the church’s future.
Twice, he joined other conservative cardinals in formally asking Francis to explain himself on doctrine issues reflecting a more progressive bent, including on the possibility of same-sex blessings and his outreach to divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.
Francis eventually sanctioned Burke financially, accusing him of sowing “disunity.” It was one of several personnel moves he made in both the Vatican and around the world to shift the balance of power from doctrinaire leaders to more pastoral ones.
Francis insisted his bishops and cardinals imbue themselves with the “odor of their flock” and minister to the faithful, voicing displeasure when they didn’t.
His 2014 Christmas address to the Vatican Curia was one of the greatest public papal reprimands ever: Standing in the marbled Apostolic Palace, Francis ticked off 15 ailments that he said can afflict his closest collaborators, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” lusting for power and the “terrorism of gossip.”
Trying to eliminate corruption, Francis oversaw the reform of the scandal-marred Vatican bank and sought to wrestle Vatican bureaucrats into financial line, limiting their compensation and ability to receive gifts or award public contracts.
He authorized Vatican police to raid his own secretariat of state and the Vatican’s financial watchdog agency amid suspicions about a 350 million euro investment in a London real estate venture. After a 2 1/2-year trial, the Vatican tribunal convicted a once-powerful cardinal, Angelo Becciu, of embezzlement and returned mixed verdicts to nine others, acquitting one.
The trial, though, proved to be a reputational boomerang for the Holy See, showing deficiencies in the Vatican’s legal system, unseemly turf battles among monsignors, and how the pope had intervened on behalf of prosecutors.
While earning praise for trying to turn the Vatican’s finances around, Francis angered US conservatives for his frequent excoriation of the global financial market that favors the rich over the poor.
Economic justice was an important themes of his papacy, and he didn’t hide it in his first meeting with journalists when he said he wanted a “poor church that is for the poor.”
In his first major teaching document, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Francis denounced trickle-down economic theories as unproven and naive, based on a mentality “where the powerful feed upon the powerless” with no regard for ethics, the environment or even God.
“Money must serve, not rule!” he said in urging political reforms.
He elaborated on that in his major eco-encyclical “Praised Be,” denouncing the “structurally perverse” global economic system that he said exploited the poor and risked turning Earth into “an immense pile of filth.”
Some US conservatives branded Francis a Marxist. He jabbed back by saying he had many friends who were Marxists.
Soccer, opera and prayer
Born Dec. 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was the eldest of five children of Italian immigrants.
He credited his devout grandmother Rosa with teaching him how to pray. Weekends were spent listening to opera on the radio, going to Mass and attending matches of the family’s beloved San Lorenzo soccer club. As pope, his love of soccer brought him a huge collection of jerseys from visitors.
He said he received his religious calling at 17 while going to confession, recounting in a 2010 biography that, “I don’t know what it was, but it changed my life. ... I realized that they were waiting for me.”
He entered the diocesan seminary but switched to the Jesuit order in 1958, attracted to its missionary tradition and militancy.
Around this time, he suffered from pneumonia, which led to the removal of the upper part of his right lung. His frail health prevented him from becoming a missionary, and his less-than-robust lung capacity was perhaps responsible for his whisper of a voice and reluctance to sing at Mass.
On Dec. 13, 1969, he was ordained a priest, and immediately began teaching. In 1973, he was named head of the Jesuits in Argentina, an appointment he later acknowledged was “crazy” given he was only 36. “My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” he admitted in his Civilta Cattolica interview.
Life under Argentina’s dictatorship
His six-year tenure as provincial coincided with Argentina’s murderous 1976-83 dictatorship, when the military launched a campaign against left-wing guerrillas and other regime opponents.
Bergoglio didn’t publicly confront the junta and was accused of effectively allowing two slum priests to be kidnapped and tortured by not publicly endorsing their work.
He refused for decades to counter that version of events. Only in a 2010 authorized biography did he finally recount the behind-the-scenes lengths he used to save them, persuading the family priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to call in sick so he could say Mass instead. Once in the junta leader’s home, Bergoglio privately appealed for mercy. Both priests were eventually released, among the few to have survived prison.
As pope, accounts began to emerge of the many people — priests, seminarians and political dissidents — whom Bergoglio actually saved during the “dirty war,” letting them stay incognito at the seminary or helping them escape the country.
Bergoglio went to Germany in 1986 to research a never-finished thesis. Returning to Argentina, he was stationed in Cordoba during a period he described as a time of “great interior crisis.” Out of favor with more progressive Jesuit leaders, he was eventually rescued from obscurity in 1992 by St. John Paul II, who named him an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. He became archbishop six years later, and was made a cardinal in 2001.
He came close to becoming pope in 2005 when Benedict was elected, gaining the second-most votes in several rounds of balloting before bowing out.


Newsom floats cutting free health care for some migrants in California

Newsom floats cutting free health care for some migrants in California
Updated 25 sec ago
Follow

Newsom floats cutting free health care for some migrants in California

Newsom floats cutting free health care for some migrants in California
  • Wednesday’s announcement dovetails with Newsom’s push to present himself as a fiscally responsible alternative to Trump, while trying to keep pace with the national mood on immigration

LOS ANGELES: California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday proposed eliminating free health care for undocumented migrants in what he said was an effort to balance a budget battered by Donald Trump’s erratic governance.
The move is the latest sign of political moderation from a man believed to have White House ambitions, who is looking to soften his image among conservative voters and dinstance himself from a reputation as a free-spending liberal helming a state where migration is out of control.
Newsom told a press conference that California should freeze admission to the public Medi-Cal program for undocumented people starting next year, and should charge those already enrolled $100 per month.
“We’re not cutting or rolling back those that enrolled in our medical system. We’re just capping it, particularly for those without documentation,” he said.
Almost 11 percent of the 15 million Medi-Cal recipients are undocumented, Newsom said.
In March, the California state legislature reported that opening Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants — which began in 2023 — had cost $2.7 billion more than expected in 2024.
The program’s costs have also been bloated by high drug prices, including a growing demand for weight control prescriptions.
Trimming eligibility for Medi-Cal and cutting back on drug availability could save the state approximately $5.4 billion over the coming years, Newsom’s office said.
He presented the idea as part of an overall plan to make up a $12 billion shortfall in California’s budget.
Newsom said the state’s financial situation was due in part to the impact of President Donald Trump’s volatile tariff policies, which have walloped California, the world’s fourth largest economy, and one that is heavily exposed to international trade and tourism.
The state’s revenues for the first 18 months of Trump’s presidency were expected to be $16 billion lower than they would have been without the volatility, a fall he dubbed the “Trump Slump.”
Economists say the US economy as a whole is expected to take a hit from the uncertainty generated by the sudden policy lurches from the White House, with business leaders unwilling to invest and consumers increasingly wary of spending.
California last month sued the Trump administration over the tariffs, saying the president did not have the ability to impose taxes on imports unilaterally, a power the lawsuit said rests only with Congress.
Wednesday’s announcement dovetails with Newsom’s push to present himself as a fiscally responsible alternative to Trump, while trying to keep pace with the national mood on immigration.
But he faces a tough balancing act in a state where a majority of voters support providing health care to undocumented migrants.
“California is under assault. The United States of America, in many respects, is under assault because we have a president that’s been reckless in terms of assaulting those growth engines,” he told reporters.
“It’s created a climate of deep uncertainty,” he added.
“This is a Trump Slump all across the United States, reflected in adjustments by every independent economist, by leading banks, by institutions.”
Local Republicans hit back Wednesday, characterizing the budget shortfall as Democratic Party overspending that disproportionately benefits migrants.
“I urged the governor to immediately freeze his reckless Medi-Cal expansion for illegal immigrants a year and a half ago, before it buried our health care system and bankrupted the state,” state Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones said.
“With a massive deficit largely driven by this policy, our focus should be on preserving Medi-Cal for those it was originally designed to serve.”
Newsom’s proposal must now go to the state legislature for review.


Hotline between military and air traffic controllers in Washington hasn’t worked for over 3 years

Hotline between military and air traffic controllers in Washington hasn’t worked for over 3 years
Updated 3 min 59 sec ago
Follow

Hotline between military and air traffic controllers in Washington hasn’t worked for over 3 years

Hotline between military and air traffic controllers in Washington hasn’t worked for over 3 years
  • The Army didn’t immediately comment Wednesday about the near miss earlier this month

A hotline between military and civilian air traffic controllers in Washington, D.C., that hasn’t worked for more than three years may have contributed to another near miss shortly after the US Army resumed flying helicopters in the area for the first time since January’s deadly midair collision between a passenger jet and a Black Hawk helicopter, Sen. Ted Cruz said at a hearing Wednesday.
The Federal Aviation Administration official in charge of air traffic controllers, Frank McIntosh, confirmed the agency didn’t even know the hotline hadn’t been working since March 2022 until after the latest near miss. He said civilian controllers still have other means of communicating with their military counterparts through landlines. Still, the FAA insists the hotline be fixed before helicopter flights resume around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
The Army didn’t immediately comment Wednesday about the near miss earlier this month and the steps it is taking to ensure helicopter flights in the area are safe or about the hotline.
The FAA said in a statement that the dedicated direct access line between air traffic controllers at Reagan and the Pentagon’s Army heliport hasn’t worked since 2022 because of the construction of a new tower at the Pentagon. But the FAA said “the two facilities continue to communicate via telephone for coordination.”
“The developments at DCA  in its airspace are extremely concerning,” Cruz said. “This committee remains laser-focused on monitoring a safe return to operations at DCA and making sure all users in the airspace are operating responsibly.”
The Army suspended all helicopter flights around Reagan airport after the latest near miss, but McIntosh said the FAA was close to ordering the Army to stop flying because of the safety concerns before it did so voluntarily.
“We did have discussions if that was an option that we wanted to pursue,” McIntosh told the Senate Commerce Committee at the hearing.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former NTSB and FAA accident investigator, said “the fact that they were unaware that this connection was not working for three years is troublesome.” But he is not entirely clear on the purpose of the hotline when controllers had other ways to communicate.
But Guzzetti thinks the Army needs to be more forthcoming about what it is doing to ensure the airspace around Washington remains safe. Since the crash, the Army has at times refused to provide information that Congress has asked for, and officials didn’t answer all the questions at a previous hearing.
“The DCA airspace is under the white hot spotlight. So the Army’s going to have to be more transparent and more assertive in their dealings with this problem,” Guzzetti said.
According to a US official, one course of action under consideration now is to have the Army give 24 hours notice of any flights around National Airport. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made and discussions are ongoing.
January’s crash between an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter killed 67 people — making it the deadliest plane crash on US soil since 2001. The National Transportation Safety Board has said there were an alarming 85 near misses around Reagan in the three years before the crash that should have prompted action.
Since the crash, the FAA has tried to ensure that military helicopters never share the same airspace as planes, but controllers had to order two planes to abort their landings on May 1 because of an Army helicopter circling near the Pentagon.
“After the deadly crash near Reagan National Airport, FAA closed the helicopter route involved, but a lack of coordination between FAA and the Department of Defense has continued to put the flying public at risk,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth said.
McIntosh said the helicopter should never have entered the airspace around Reagan airport without permission from an air traffic controller.
“That did not occur,” he said. “My question — and I think the larger question is — is why did that not occur? Without compliance to our procedures and our policies, this is where safety drift starts to happen.”
The NTSB is investigating what happened.
In addition to that incident, a commercial flight taking off from Reagan airport had to take evasive action after coming within a few hundred feet of four military jets heading to a flyover at Arlington National Cemetery. McIntosh blamed that incident on a miscommunication between FAA air traffic controllers at a regional facility and the tower at Reagan, which he said had been addressed.
 


‘They need to let food to starving kids!’: Ben & Jerry’s cofounder confronts RFK Jr in Gaza protest at US Capitol

‘They need to let food to starving kids!’: Ben & Jerry’s cofounder confronts RFK Jr in Gaza protest at US Capitol
Updated 16 min 10 sec ago
Follow

‘They need to let food to starving kids!’: Ben & Jerry’s cofounder confronts RFK Jr in Gaza protest at US Capitol

‘They need to let food to starving kids!’: Ben & Jerry’s cofounder confronts RFK Jr in Gaza protest at US Capitol

WASHINGTON: Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and longtime progressive activist, was removed from a Senate hearing Wednesday after confronting Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and lawmakers over US support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Kennedy had been reading prepared remarks about his department’s 2026 budget when activists interrupted the session, chanting “RFK kills people with AIDS.”
Kennedy jumped from his seat in reaction to the outburst.
Cohen then shouted: “Congress pays for bombs to kill children in Gaza,” accusing lawmakers of funding arms by cutting Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income families that Republicans are seeking to slash.
Video posted by anti-war group Codepink showed the 74-year-old in handcuffs as Capitol Police escorted him from the chamber.
“They need to let food into Gaza, they need to let food to starving kids!” Cohen yelled as he was taken away.
A vocal critic of Israeli policy, Cohen last year co-signed an open letter titled A Statement From Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC, denouncing the pro-Israel lobby’s influence in US politics.


Trump administration scraps Biden-era plan to limit sale of Americans’ personal data

Trump administration scraps Biden-era plan to limit sale of Americans’ personal data
Updated 34 min 39 sec ago
Follow

Trump administration scraps Biden-era plan to limit sale of Americans’ personal data

Trump administration scraps Biden-era plan to limit sale of Americans’ personal data
  • Consumer Reports said the withdrawal of the data broker proposal would leave consumers “vulnerable to scams and identity theft”

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is scrapping a proposal issued under former President Joe Biden that would have sharply limited the sale of Americans’ private information by “data brokers,” according to a Federal Register notice issued Wednesday.

The agency also yanked proposals that sought to extend consumer protections to the use of new digital payment technologies including cryptocurrency, and that would have prohibited certain terms in the fine print in consumer finance products.

In a statement, Consumer Reports said the withdrawal of the data broker proposal would leave consumers “vulnerable to scams and identity theft.”

President Donald Trump’s administration has moved this year to decimate the CFPB, initially seeking to shut it down entirely and subsequently saying it can meet its legal obligations with about 10 percent of its current staff. Efforts to fire large amounts of staff are currently on hold as federal courts consider the matter.

Senior officials in recent days have continued undoing much of the prior administration’s work in regulation and oversight. The agency last week withdrew scores of guidance documents issued across administrations since 2011.

In proposing the limits on data brokers in January, former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said the sale of Americans’ private information to data brokers was a “staggering” problem that also jeopardized national security by putting government officials’ privacy at risk.

The CFPB did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, in a Federal Register notice, Russell Vought, the current acting CFPB director, said the proposal no longer aligned with the bureau’s changed policy objectives and its interpretation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

“Further, commenters raised numerous concerns related to this proposed rule that the Bureau believes require careful consideration before proceeding with a final rule,” he said. These included whether the proposal was at odds with federal law.


The Menendez brothers case reflects a shifting culture across decades

The Menendez brothers case reflects a shifting culture across decades
Menendez brothers
Updated 40 min 40 sec ago
Follow

The Menendez brothers case reflects a shifting culture across decades

The Menendez brothers case reflects a shifting culture across decades
  • A judge made the Menendez brothers eligible for parole Tuesday

LOS ANGELES: The trials of Lyle and Erik Menendez came at a time of cultural obsession with courts, crime and murder, when live televised trials captivated a national audience.
Their resentencing — and the now very real possibility of their freedom — came at another, when true crime documentaries and docudramas have proliferated and brought renewed attention to the family.
A judge made the Menendez brothers eligible for parole Tuesday when he reduced their sentences from life without parole to 50 years to life for the 1989 murder of their father Jose Menendez and mother Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills home. The state parole board will now determine whether they can be released.
Their two trials bookended the O.J. Simpson trial, creating a mid-1990s phenomenon where courts subsumed soap operas as riveting daytime television.
“People were not used to having cameras in the courtroom. For the first time we were seeing the drama of justice in real time,” said Vinnie Politan, a Court TV anchor who hosts the nightly “Closing Arguments” on the network. “Everyone was watching cable and everyone had that common experience. Today there’s a true crime bonanza happening, but it’s splintered off into so many different places.”
The brothers became an immediate sensation with their 1990 arrest. They represented a pre-tech-boom image of young wealthy men as portrayed in many a 1980s movie: the tennis-playing, Princeton-bound prep.
For many viewers, this image was confirmed by the spending spree they went on after the killings. Their case continued a fascination with the dark, private lives of the young and wealthy that goes back at least to the Leopold and Loeb murder case of the 1930s, but had been in the air in cases like the Billionaire Boys Club, a 1980s Ponzi scheme that spurred a murder.
The first Menendez trial becomes compelling live TV
Their first trials in 1993 and 1994 became a landmark for then-new Court TV, which aired it nearly in its entirety. Defense lawyers conceded that they had shot their parents. The jury, and the public, then had to consider whether the brothers’ testimony about sexual and other abuse from their father was plausible, and should mean conviction on a lesser charge.
The lasting image from the trial was Lyle Menendez crying on the stand as he described the abuse.
At the time there had been some public reckoning with the effects of sex abuse, but not nearly to the extent of today.
The two juries — one for each brother — deadlocked, largely along gender lines. It reflected the broader cultural reaction — with women supporting a manslaughter conviction and men a guilty verdict for first-degree murder.
A tough-on-crime era, and a Menendez trial sequel
The trials came at a time when crime in the US was at an all-time high, a tough-on-crime stance was a prerequisite for holding major political office, and a wave of legislation mandating harsher sentences was passed.
That attitude appeared to prevail when, at their second trial, the brothers were both convicted of first-degree murder.
As Associated Press trial reporter Linda Deutsch, who covered both trials along with Simpson’s and countless others, wrote in 1996:
“This time, the jury rejected the defense claim that the brothers murdered their parents after years of sexual abuse. Instead, it embraced the prosecution theory that the killings were planned and that the brothers were greedy, spoiled brats who murdered to get their parents’ $14 million fortune.”
The second trial was not televised and got less attention.


“There were no cameras, it was in the shadow of O.J. so it didn’t have the same spark and pop as the first one,” Politan said.
The Menendez brothers become a distant memory
They had become too well-known to be forgotten, but for decades, the Menendez brothers faded into the background. Occasional stories emerged about the brothers losing their appeals, as did mugshots of them aging in prison.
“The public’s memory of them was, ‘Yeah, I remember that trial, the guys with the sweaters in court,’” Politan said.
That would change in the era of true-crime TV, podcasts and streamers.
True crime goes big
The 2017 NBC drama series “Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders,” wasn’t widely watched, but still brought the case new attention. The next decade would prove more important.
The 2022 Max docuseries “Menudo: Forever Young” included a former member saying he was raped by Jose Menendez when he was 14. At about the same time, the brothers submitted a letter that Erik wrote to his cousin about his father’s abuse before the killings.
The new true-crime wave would continue to promote them, even if the portrayal wasn’t always flattering.
” Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” a drama created by Ryan Murphy on Netflix, made them beautiful and vain buffoons, and the actors were shown shirtless on provocative billboards. Javier Bardem as Jose Menendez brought Oscar-winning star power to the project that dropped in September of last year.
That was followed a month later by a documentary on Netflix, “The Menendez Brothers.”
Together, the shows had the public paying more attention to the case than it had since the trials. Almost simultaneously came a real-life turning point, when then- Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón said he was reviewing new evidence in the case.
The office of Gascón’s successor, Nathan Hochman, opposed the resentencing.
Deputy District Attorney Habib Balian constantly sought at hearings to make sure the “carnage” caused by the brothers wasn’t forgotten, and repeatedly emphasized that they “shotgunned, brutally, their parents to death.”
But the shifts in public perception and legal actions were already in motion. The judge’s decision to reduce their charges came not with the drama of the televised trial, but in a short hearing in a courtroom that wouldn’t allow cameras. The broader public never saw.
Despite his opposition, Hochman was reflective in a statement after the resentencing.
“The case of the Menendez brothers has long been a window for the public to better understand the judicial system,” Hochman said. “This case, like all cases — especially those that captivate the public — must be viewed with a critical eye. Our opposition and analysis ensured that the Court received a complete and accurate record of the facts. Justice should never be swayed by spectacle.”