Black smoke billows as Catholic cardinals remain undecided on new pope
Black smoke billowed out from the Sistine Chapel's chimney for the second time as the 133 Catholic cardinals remained undecided on who to select as the new leader of the Catholic Church. NBC News' Lester Holt and Anne Thompson report on the latest round of voting for a new pope.May 8, 2025
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NBC News
9 hours ago
- NBC News
How RFK Jr. is quickly changing U.S. health agencies
WASHINGTON — In just a few short months, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has begun to transform U.S. health policy: shrinking staff at health agencies, restructuring the focus of some regulators and researchers, changing Covid vaccine regulations and reshaping the mission of his department to focus more on alternative medicine. The directives are all part of the same issue set that drove a slice of health-conscious, left-leaning Americans to eventually vote for a Republican president whose favorite meal is from McDonald's, Trump and Kennedy catered to a type of voter who has grown distrustful of America's health care establishment — but possibly fomented a new type of distrust in federal health policy along the way. Bernadine Francis, a lifelong Democrat who backed Joe Biden for president in 2020 before supporting Donald Trump in 2024, told NBC News in an interview that she approves of Kennedy's efforts so far, despite his 'hands being tied' by entrenched forces in the administration and in Congress. 'From what I have seen so far with what RFK has been trying to do,' she said, 'I am really, really proud of what he's doing.' Francis is among the voters who left the Democratic Party and voted for Trump because 'nothing else mattered' apart from public health, which they — like Kennedy — felt was going in the wrong direction. Concerns about chemicals in food and toxins in the environment, long championed by Democrats, has become a galvanizing issue to a key portion of Trump's Republican Party, complete with an oversaturation of information that in some cases hasn't been proven. It's wrapped up, as well, in concerns about the Covid vaccine, which was accelerated under Trump, administered under Biden and weaponized by anti-vaccine activists like Kennedy amid lockdowns and firings in the wake of the devastating pandemic. 'We knew in order to get RFK in there so he can help with the situation that we have in the health industry, we knew we had to do this,' said Francis, a retired Washington, D.C., public school administrator, who said she left her 'beloved' career because she had refused the vaccine. 'It seemed to me, as soon as [Biden] became president, the vaccine was mandated, and that was when I lost all hope in the Democrats,' Francis told NBC News, referring to vaccination mandates put in place by the Biden administration for a large portion of the federal workforce during the height of the pandemic. There are not currently any federal Covid vaccine mandates. There have been 1,228,393 confirmed Covid deaths in the United States since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. How RFK Jr.'s picks are changing public health agencies Dr. Marty Makary, Kennedy's hand-picked commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and a John Hopkins scientist and researcher, told NBC News in an interview that he wants to transform the agency, which he said faced 'corruption' over influence from the pharmaceutical and food industries. 'I mean, you look at the food pyramid, it was not based on what's best for you, it was based on what companies wanted you to buy,' he said, referring to the 1992 and later iterations of official government nutritional guidance. He said there would be 'entirely new nutrition guidance' released later this year, as soon as this summer. He praised the FDA's mission of research and regulation, saying the agency is 'incredibly well-oiled, and we've got the trains running on time.' He also highlighted the 75-page 'Make America Healthy Again' commission report — which focused on ultraprocessed foods and toxins in the environment — as having set 'the agenda for research' at the FDA, HHS and agencies overseeing social safety net programs such as Medicare and food stamps moving forward. (The MAHA report initially cited some studies that didn't exist, a mistake that Kennedy adviser Calley Means said was a 'great disservice' to their mission.) 'I think there's a lot we're going to learn. For example, the microbiome, which gets attention in the MAHA report, needs to be on the map. We don't even talk about it in our medical circles,' Makary said. 'The microbiome, food is medicine, the immune response that happens when chemicals that don't appear in nature go down our GI tract.' Pressed on other areas of the administration, like the Environmental Protection Agency, making decisions that run counter to the pro-regulatory ideas presented in the MAHA report, Makary said he can 'only comment on the FDA' where they are 'committed to Secretary Kennedy's vision.' But Kennedy's public health agenda goes beyond looking at the food supply and chemicals. Recently, Kennedy said in a video posted on X last month that the Covid vaccine is no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women, a change in CDC guidance that skipped the normal public review period. Days later, after critics questioned the decision and raised concerns over a lack of public data behind the move, the administration updated its guidance again, urging parents to consult with their doctors instead. Pressed about the confusion and whether Americans are now trading one side of public distrust in the health system for another, Makary defended Kennedy, who has been criticized for spreading misinformation. 'My experience with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is that he listens. He listens to myself, he listens to Jay Bhattacharya, listens to Dr. Mehmet Oz, he listens to a host of scientists that are giving him guidance,' Makary argued, referring to the director of the National Institutes of Health and the administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, respectively. 'So he may have big questions, but the questions he's asking are the questions most Americans are asking.' The intersection of medicine and healthy lifestyle choices Dr. Dawn Mussallem, a breast cancer oncologist and integrative medicine doctor — a physician who combines conventional treatments with research-based alternative therapies — has tried to help her patients wade through medical misinformation they encounter online and in their social circles. Mussallem has an incredible story of personal survival: While in medical school, she was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer and, after conventional therapies like chemo saved her life, was diagnosed with heart failure. After undergoing a heart transplant, Mussallem ran a 26-mile marathon just one year later. 'I learned a lot in medical school, but nothing compared to what I learned being a patient,' said Mussallem, who dedicates, on average, 90 minutes each in one-on-one sessions with her patients. 'This is not about any one political choice. But we know lifestyle matters.' For example, a new study from the American Society of Clinical Oncology that finds eating food that lowers inflammation in the body may help people with advanced colon cancer survive longer. Mussallem's mission, along with her colleagues, is to elevate the modern medicine that saved her life, as well as encouraging her patients to live healthy lifestyles, including regular exercise, minimally processed foods, less screen time, more social connection and better sleep. But politics do get in the way for millions of Americans who are inundated daily with social media influencers and 'nonmedical experts,' as Mussallem puts it, who stoke fear in her patients. 'Patients come in with all these questions, fears,' she said. 'I've heard this many times from patients, that their nervous system is affected by what they're seeing happening in government.' Mussallem acknowledges that 'a lot of individuals out there' have questioned traditional medicine. For her, it isn't one or the other — it's both. 'We have to trust the conventional medicine,' she said. 'With the conventional care that marches right alongside more of an integrative modality to look at the root causes of disease, as well as to help to optimize with lifestyle, is where we need to be.'
NBC News
9 hours ago
- NBC News
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, will face federal charges
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whose erroneous deportation to El Salvador became a protracted battle over due process and a test of wills, will face human smuggling charges in Tennessee, NBC News has learned. Abrego Garcia has been named in an indictment charging him with transporting within the U.S. people not legally in the country. The two-count indictment, sealed by a Tennessee court last month, alleges Abrego Garcia participated in a conspiracy over several years to move people from Texas, deeper into the country. The two-count indictment alleges that those transported included members of the MS-13 gang. A federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court had long ago ordered the federal government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return to the U.S., but the administration dragged its feet and resisted. At times the administration insisted that Abrego Garcia's return was up to El Salvador's President Nayiob Bukele, who refused to return him. The administration had accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the MS-13 Salvadoran gang and gave that as reason to deport him, despite a judge's order from 2019 barring him from being sent to his home country. Garcia was deported March 15 amid a flurry of arrests and deportations after Trunp invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a law only used before in wartime, to target Venezuelan immigrants and other immigrants he alleged to be gang members and "invaders" of the U.S. He was taken to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, known for its harsh and brutal conditions. Government attorneys had said he was taken there as a result of "administrative error". The Supreme Court ruled in April that Abrego Garcia's removal was "illegal" and determined that a judge's order for the administration to facilitate his return was proper. Initially the administration said it had deported Abrego Garcia in error, but as calls for his return intensified, the administration doubled down on keeping him incarcerated in El Salvador. Despite orders to bring him back, the administration stood its ground over and over, raising concerns about its defiance of the judicial branch and setting off threats of contempt from the bench. Abrego Garcia's wife has insisted that he was not involved in criminal activity. 'Kilmar worked in construction and sometimes transported groups of workers between job sites, so it's entirely plausible he would have been pulled over while driving with others in the vehicle,' his wife previously said in a statement. 'He was not charged with any crime or cited for any wrongdoing." A federal judge ordered the Trump administration just last week to give hundreds of migrants in El Salvador's CECOT prison the chance to challenge their detentions and removals.
NBC News
13 hours ago
- NBC News
Hidden invasion: Rwanda's covert war in the Congo
Open secret From the start, Rwanda has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal its intervention in the Kivu provinces in eastern Congo, which went from a couple of hundred soldiers in 2021 to an estimated 5,000 today. But there have been lapses in Rwanda's secrecy. In May 2022, Congolese forces announced they had captured two Rwandan soldiers who had entered the country. Rwanda denied this, claiming the soldiers were kidnapped across the border. NBC News obtained a Rwandan military report that admitted that these soldiers were captured while taking part in an M23 attack on barracks at Rumangabo military base. The internal report says members of the Rwanda Defence Force crossing the border were supposed to leave cellphones behind and strip identifying insignia from their uniforms. It recommends punishment for the soldiers' commander for failing to ensure the captured soldiers did so. In a bid to remove witnesses, Rwandan soldiers forced Congolese villagers to evacuate areas they occupied, according to a contractor hired to provide intelligence for the Congolese military. Operations like this drove hundreds of thousands from their homes. 'This is not business as usual in the DRC,' Antoine Sagot-Priez, DRC country director for the aid agency Concern Worldwide, said in March, commenting on the mass displacement. 'We need people to know what is happening here.' These villagers ended up living in 17 camps around the city of Goma, the capital of Congo's North Kivu province, that would eventually swell to hold 400,000 to 500,000 people. Reports drawn up by the same contractor state that Rwandan forces were moving their mortars in and out of Congo — sometimes each day — apparently to avoid detection. Rwandan soldiers also often don outfits usually worn by the M23 rebels. Much of the information used in this report was compiled by Western military experts, who included former French army officers, Romanians, Poles and Bulgarians, hired by Congo's President Felix Tshisekedi in 2022 when he realized his army was disastrously losing ground. They were assigned the task of protecting cities in the east and providing Congo's artillery with key information — thanks to a small fleet of Chinese drones. In March 2023, these new hires helped turn the tables on the Rwandans attacking the town of Sake, west of Goma, by hitting their mortar positions with Sukhoi fighter jets. The entire Rwandan force in Congo withdrew the following day. Military contractors believe this was the moment Rwanda — one of Africa's poorest states and heavily dependent on foreign aid — went on an international military shopping spree, placing orders in Poland and Turkey for sophisticated anti-missile systems, drones and signal-jamming equipment. Then in late 2023, Rwandan forces began returning to Congo. This time the numbers were 10 times higher than before — 3,000 to 5,000 men, according to the same military contractor. The Congolese army put its new drones to devastating use. Satellite imagery shows a sudden, dramatic increase in the number of graves at Kanombe Military Cemetery, Rwanda's main military burial ground in the capital, Kigali. It expanded by some 350 graves between mid-2023 and early 2024, according to a manual count carried out by NBC News. The images also show that from late 2021 to today, the cemetery has added 900 graves, even though the country says it is not engaged in any military conflict in Congo. Rwanda's government spokesperson declined to comment on the fresh graves, saying: 'Speculation about a military cemetery in Kigali has no basis in reality.' The DRC's air superiority did not last long. According to senior Congolese army officers, Rwanda used the opportunity presented by a U.S.-negotiated truce to install Chinese-made Yitian anti-missile systems in Congo. The addition in early 2024 of GPS-jamming equipment turned the war's tide, making it nearly impossible for the DRC's hired contractors to deploy their drone fleet. 'The new equipment changed everything,' said Gen. Sylvain Ekenge, a Congolese army spokesman. 'When we were asked by the Americans for a ceasefire to calm things down, the Rwandans used it as a chance to bring in these systems.'
