Politics
Pope returns home after 5-week hospital stay for pneumonia – National TenX News
A weak and frail Pope Francis returned home to the Vatican from the hospital on Sunday after surviving a five-week, life-threatening bout of pneumonia, making a surprise stop at his favorite basilica on the way home before beginning two months of prescribed rest and recovery.
The motorcade carrying the 88-year-old pope entered the Perugino gate into Vatican City, and Francis was seen in the front passenger seat wearing nasal tubes to give him supplemental oxygen.
During the trip home from Gemelli hospital, Francis took a slight detour to bring him to the St. Mary Major basilica, where his favorite icon of the Madonna is located and where he always goes to pray after a foreign visit. Francis didn’t get out of the car, but handed a bouquet of flowers to the cardinal to place in front of the Salus populi Romani icon, a Byzantine-style painting on wood that is revered by Romans.
Before leaving the hospital, Francis gave a thumbs up and acknowledged the crowd after he was wheeled out onto the balcony overlooking the main entry. Hundreds of people had gathered on a brilliant Sunday morning to say goodbye.
“I see this woman with the yellow flowers. Brava!” a tired and bloated-looking Francis said. He gave a weak sign of the cross before being wheeled back inside.
Pope Francis waves as he appears at a window of the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome, Sunday, March 23, 2025, where he has been treated for bronchitis and bilateral pneumonia since Feb. 14.
AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis
Chants of “Viva il papa!” and “Papa Francesco” erupted from the crowd, which included patients who had been wheeled outside just to catch his brief appearance.
Doctors, who announced his planned release at a Saturday evening news conference, said he needs two months of rest and convalescence, during which he should refrain from meeting with big groups of people or exerting himself. But they said eventually he should be able to resume all his normal activities.
His return home, after the longest hospitalization of his 12-year papacy and the second-longest in recent papal history, brought tangible relief to the Vatican and Catholic faithful who have been anxiously following 38 days of medical ups and downs and wondering if Francis would make it.
“Today I feel a great joy,” said Dr. Rossella Russomando, a doctor from Salerno who didn’t treat Francis but was at Gemelli on Sunday. “It is the demonstration that all our prayers, all the rosary prayers from all over the world, brought this grace.”
At the Vatican Sunday, pilgrims flocked as they have all year to St. Peter’s Basilica to participate in the 2025 Holy Year. They swarmed St. Peter’s Square and progressed through the Holy Door in groups, while big TV screens in the square were turned on to broadcast Francis’ hospital greeting live.
No special arrangements have been made at the Domus Santa Marta, the Vatican hotel next to the basilica where Francis lives in a two-room suite on the second floor. Francis will have access to supplemental oxygen and 24-hour medical care as needed, though his personal physician, Dr. Luigi Carbone, said he hoped Francis would progressively need less and less assistance breathing as his lungs recover.
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While the pneumonia infection has been successfully treated, Francis will continue to take oral medication for quite some time to treat the fungal infection in his lungs and continue his respiratory and physical physiotherapy.
“For three or four days he’s been asking when he can go home, so he’s very happy,” Carbone said.
Two life-threatening crises
The Argentine pope, who has chronic lung disease and had part of one lung removed as a young man, was admitted to Gemelli on Feb. 14 after a bout of bronchitis worsened.
Doctors first diagnosed a complex bacterial, viral and fungal respiratory tract infection and soon thereafter, pneumonia in both lungs. Blood tests showed signs of anemia, low blood platelets and the onset of kidney failure, all of which later resolved after two blood transfusions.
The most serious setbacks began on Feb. 28, when Francis experienced an acute coughing fit and inhaled vomit, requiring the use of a noninvasive mechanical ventilation mask to help him breathe. He suffered two more respiratory crises a few days later, which required doctors to manually aspirate “copious” amounts of mucus from his lungs, at which point he began sleeping with the ventilation mask at night to help his lungs clear the accumulation of fluids.
He was never intubated and at no point lost consciousness. Doctors reported he always remained alert and cooperative, though they say he has probably lost a bit of weight given a natural loss of appetite.
“Unfortunately yes, there was a moment when many were saying that he might not make it. And it was painful for us,” said Mario Balsamo, the owner of coffee shop in front of Gemelli. “Instead, today with the discharge, we are very happy that he is well and we hope he will recover soon and will recover his strength.”
Dr. Sergio Alfieri, the medical and surgical chief at Gemelli who coordinated Francis’ medical team, stressed that not all patients who develop such a severe case of double pneumonia survive, much less are released from the hospital. He said Francis’ life was at risk twice, during the two acute respiratory crises, and that the pope at the time understandably lost his typical good sense of humor.
“But one morning we went to listen to his lungs and we asked him how he was doing. When he replied, ‘I’m still alive,’ we knew he was OK and had gotten his good humor back,” he said.
Alfieri confirmed that Francis was still having trouble speaking due to the damage to his lungs and respiratory muscles. But he said such problems were normal, especially in older patients, and predicted his voice would eventually return to normal.
No confirmed appointments for now
The Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, declined to confirm any upcoming events, including a scheduled audience on April 8 with King Charles III or Francis’ participation in Easter services at the end of the month. But Carbone said he hoped Francis might be well enough to travel to Turkey at the end of May to participate in an important ecumenical anniversary.
Francis is also returning to the Vatican in the throes of a Holy Year, the once-every-quarter-century celebration scheduled to draw more than 30 million pilgrims to Rome this year. The pope has already missed several Jubilee audiences and will presumably miss several more, but Vatican officials say his absence hasn’t significantly impacted the numbers of expected pilgrims arriving.
Only St. John Paul II recorded a longer hospitalization in 1981, when he spent 55 days at Gemelli for minor surgery and treatment of an infection.
Associated Press writers Giada Zampano in Rome and Colleen Barry in Soave, Italy contributed to this report.
Politics
X outages reported by tens of thousands of users worldwide: Downdetector – National TenX News
X, formerly Twitter, was down for tens of thousands of users worldwide on Friday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
There were more than 62,000 reports of issues with the social media platform as of 10:22 a.m. EST, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources.
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Users in the U.K. reported around 11,000 incidents and over 3,000 issues were reported in India.
The actual number of affected users may differ from what is shown on the platform, as the reports are submitted by users.
Politics
Trump says he may tariff countries that don’t ‘go along’ with Greenland plans – National TenX News
U.S. President Donald Trump suggested Friday that he may punish countries with tariffs if they don’t back the U.S. controlling Greenland, a message that came as a bipartisan Congressional delegation sought to lower tensions in the Danish capital.
Trump for months has insisted that the U.S. should control Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark, and said earlier this week that anything less than the Arctic island being in U.S. hands would be “unacceptable.”
During an unrelated event at the White House about rural health care, he recounted Friday how he had threatened European allies with tariffs on pharmaceuticals.
“I may do that for Greenland too,” Trump said. “I may put a tariff on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland, because we need Greenland for national security. So I may do that,” he said.
He had not previously mentioned using tariffs to try to force the issue.
Earlier this week, the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland met in Washington this week with U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
That encounter didn’t resolve the deep differences but did produce an agreement to set up a working group — on whose purpose Denmark and the White House then offered sharply diverging public views.
European leaders have insisted that is only for Denmark and Greenland to decide on matters concerning the territory, and Denmark said this week that it was increasing its military presence in Greenland in cooperation with allies.
A relationship ‘we need to nurture’
In Copenhagen, a group of senators and members of the House of Representatives met Friday with Danish and Greenlandic lawmakers, and with leaders including Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.
Delegation leader Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, thanked the group’s hosts for “225 years of being a good and trusted ally and partner” and said that “we had a strong and robust dialog about how we extend that into the future.”
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Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said after meeting lawmakers that the visit reflected a strong relationship over decades and “it is one that we need to nurture.” She told reporters that “Greenland needs to be viewed as our ally, not as an asset, and I think that’s what you’re hearing with this delegation.”
The tone contrasted with that emanating from the White House. Trump has sought to justify his calls for a U.S. takeover by repeatedly claiming that China and Russia have their own designs on Greenland, which holds vast untapped reserves of critical minerals. The White House hasn’t ruled out taking the territory by force.
“We have heard so many lies, to be honest and so much exaggeration on the threats towards Greenland,” said Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic politician and member of the Danish parliament who took part in Friday’s meetings. “And mostly, I would say the threats that we’re seeing right now is from the U.S. side.”
Murkowski emphasized the role of Congress in spending and in conveying messages from constituents.
“I think it is important to underscore that when you ask the American people whether or not they think it is a good idea for the United States to acquire Greenland, the vast majority, some 75%, will say, we do not think that that is a good idea,” she said.
Along with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, Murkowski has introduced bipartisan legislation that would prohibit the use of U.S. Defense or State department funds to annex or take control of Greenland or the sovereign territory of any NATO member state without that ally’s consent or authorization from the North Atlantic Council.
Inuit council slams White House
The dispute is looming large in the lives of Greenlanders. Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said on Tuesday that “if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU.””
The chair of the Nuuk, Greenland-based Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents around 180,000 Inuit from Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia’s Chukotka region on international issues, said persistent statements from the White House that the U.S. must own Greenland offer “a clear picture of how the US administration views the people of Greenland, how the U.S. administration views Indigenous peoples, and peoples that are few in numbers.”
Sara Olsvig told The Associated Press in Nuuk that the issue is “how one of the biggest powers in the world views other peoples that are less powerful than them. And that really is concerning.”
Indigenous Inuit in Greenland do not want to be colonized again, she said.
© 2026 The Canadian Press
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado said she presented her Nobel Peace Prize medal to President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday even as he has questioned her credibility to take over her country after the U.S. ousted then-President Nicolás Maduro.
The Nobel Institute has said Machado could not give her prize to Trump, an honour that he has coveted. Even if the gesture proves to be purely symbolic, it was extraordinary given that Trump has effectively sidelined Machado, who has long been the face of resistance in Venezuela. He has signalled his willingness to work with acting President Delcy Rodríguez, who had been Maduro’s second in command.
“I presented the president of the United States the medal, the Nobel Peace Prize,” Machado told reporters after leaving the White House and heading to Capitol Hill. She said she had done so “as a recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom.”
Trump confirmed later on social media that Machado had left the medal for him to keep, and he said it was an honour to meet her.
“She is a wonderful woman who has been through so much. María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done,” Trump said in his post. “Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you María!”
The White House later posted a photo of Machado standing next to Trump in the Oval Office as he holds the medal in a large frame. A text in the frame reads, “Presented as a personal symbol of gratitude on behalf of the Venezuelan people in recognition of President Trump’s principled and decisive action to secure a free Venezuela.”
Trump has raised doubts about his stated commitment to backing democratic rule in Venezuela, giving no timetable on when elections might be held. Machado indicated that he had provided few specifics on that front during their discussion.
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She did not provide more information on what was said.
‘We can count on President Trump’
After the closed-door meeting, Machado greeted dozens of cheering supporters waiting for her near the White House gates, stopping to hug many.
“We can count on President Trump,” she told them without elaborating, prompting some to briefly chant, “Thank you, Trump.”
Before her visit to Washington, Machado had not been seen in public since she travelled last month to Norway, where her daughter received the peace prize on her behalf. She had spent 11 months in hiding in Venezuela before she appeared in Norway after the ceremony.
The jubilant scene after her meeting with Trump stood in contrast to political realities in Venezuela. Rodríguez remains in charge of day-to-day government operations, along with others in Maduro’s inner circle. In her first state of the union speech Thursday, the interim president promoted the resumption of diplomatic ties between the historic adversaries and advocated for opening the state-run oil industry to more foreign investment after Trump pledged to seize control of Venezuelan crude sales.
Trump has said it would be difficult for Machado to lead because she “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.” Her party is widely believed to have won 2024 elections rejected by Maduro.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called Machado “a remarkable and brave voice” but also said the meeting didn’t mean Trump’s opinion of her changed, calling it “a realistic assessment.”
Leavitt told reporters that Trump supported new Venezuelan elections “when the time is right” but did not say when he thought that might be.
A ‘frank and positive discussion’ about Venezuela
Leavitt said Machado had sought the face-to-face meeting without setting expectations for what would occur. She spent about two and a half hours at the White House.
“I don’t think he needs to hear anything from Ms. Machado,” the press secretary said while the meeting was still going on, other than to have a ”frank and positive discussion about what’s taking place in Venezuela.”
After leaving the White House, Machado went on to a closed-door meeting with a bipartisan group of senators.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Machado told them that “if there’s not some progress, real progress towards a transition in power, and/or elections in the next several months, we should all be worried.”
“She reminded us that Delcy Rodríguez is, in many ways, worse than Maduro,” he added.
Asked if Machado had heard any commitment from the White House on holding elections in Venezuela, Murphy said, “No, I don’t think she got any commitment from them.”
Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, was exultant following the meeting, saying Machado “delivered a message that loud and clear: What President Trump did was the most important, significant event in Latin America. That getting rid of Maduro was absolutely essential.”
Machado’s Washington stop coincided with U.S. forces in the Caribbean Sea seizing another sanctioned oil tanker that the Trump administration says had ties to Venezuela. It is part of a broader U.S. effort to take control of the South American country’s oil after U.S. forces captured Maduro and his wife less than two weeks ago at a heavily guarded compound in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and brought them to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges.
Leavitt said Venezuela’s interim authorities have been fully cooperating with the Trump administration and noted that Rodríguez’s government said it planned to release more prisoners detained under Maduro. Among those released were five Americans this week.
Trump said Wednesday that he had a “great conversation” with Rodríguez, their first since Maduro was ousted.
Machado doesn’t get the nod from Trump
Just hours after Maduro’s capture, Trump said of Machado that “it would be very tough for her to be the leader.” Machado had steered a careful course to avoid offending Trump, notably after winning the peace prize, and had sought to cultivate relationships with him and key administration voices like Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The industrial engineer and daughter of a steel magnate, Machado began challenging the ruling party in 2004, when the nongovernmental organization she co-founded, Súmate, promoted a referendum to recall then-President Hugo Chávez. The initiative failed, and Machado and other Súmate executives were charged with conspiracy.
A year later, she drew the anger of Chávez and his allies again for travelling to Washington to meet President George W. Bush, whom Chávez considered an adversary.
Almost two decades later, she marshalled millions of Venezuelans to reject Chávez’s successor, Maduro, for another term in the 2024 election. But ruling party-loyal electoral authorities declared him the winner despite ample credible evidence to the contrary. Ensuing anti-government protests ended in a brutal crackdown.
X outages reported by tens of thousands of users worldwide: Downdetector – National TenX News
Trump says he may tariff countries that don’t ‘go along’ with Greenland plans – National TenX News
Trump gifted Nobel Peace Prize by Venezuela’s María Corina Machado – National TenX News
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