NEW YORK (AP) — Google's online calendar has removed default references for a handful of holidays and cultural events — with users noticing that mentions of Pride and Black History Month, as well as other observances, no longer appear in their desktop and mobile applications.
The omissions gained attention online over the last week, particularly around upcoming events that are no longer automatically listed. But Google says it made the change midway through last year.
The California-based tech giant said it manually added "a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries” for several years, supplementing public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com that have been used to populate Google Calendar for over a decade. Still, the company added, it received feedback about some other missing events and countries.
“Maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” Google said in a statement sent to The Associated Press. "So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.”
Google did not provide a full list of the cultural events it added prior to last year's change — and therefore no longer appear by default today.
But social media users and product experts posting to online community boards have pointed to several holidays and cultural observances that they're not seeing anymore. In addition to the first days of Pride Month and Black History Month, that includes the start of Indigenous Peoples Month and Hispanic Heritage Month, as well as Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Verge first reported on some of these omissions last week.
Norway-based Time and Date AS, which operates timeanddate.com, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday. The website shows numerous country-by-country lists of holidays and observances from around the world — some of which include cultural awareness events like Pride and Black History Month — but those specific to public holidays are more limited.
Separate from this Calendar shift, Google has also gained attention over its more recent decision to change the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali on Google Maps — following orders from President Donald Trump to rename the body of water bordering the U.S., Mexico and Cuba the Gulf of America, as well as revert the title of America’s highest mountain peak back to Mt. McKinley.
“We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” Google said last month. The company added that its maps will reflect any updates to the Geographic Names Information System, a database of more than 1 million geographic features in the U.S.
Google confirmed Monday that the Gulf of America name had gone into effect. Google Maps users in the U.S. now only see the Gulf of America name, whereas those in other countries see both names. Denali, however, still appears on both Google Maps and the GNIS.
And the new names on Google Maps aren't the only change the company has made following recent actions from the Trump administration. Last week, Google outlined plans to scrap some of its diversity hiring targets — joining a growing list of U.S. companies that have abandoned or scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Google's move notably came in the wake of an executive order aimed, in part, at pressuring government contractors to end DEI initiatives. As a federal contractor, Google said it was evaluating required changes.
By Tuesday, both Apple and Microsoft’s Bing made the switch from Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America on their maps.
FILE - A woman walks by a giant screen with a logo at an event at the Paris Google Lab on the sidelines of the AI Action Summit in Paris, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, file)
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis said in a letter published Tuesday that his lengthy illness has helped make “more lucid” to him the absurdity of war, as his top deputy shot down any suggestion of resignation and plans progressed for an April 8 meeting with Britain's King Charles III.
Italian daily Corriere della Sera published a letter to the editor from Francis, signed and dated March 14 from Rome's Gemelli hospital where the 88-year-old pontiff has been treated since Feb. 14 for a complex lung infection and double pneumonia.
In it, Francis renewed his call for diplomacy and international organizations to find a “new vitality and credibility.” And he said that his own illness had also helped make some things clearer to him, including the “absurdity of war.”
“Human fragility has the power to make us more lucid about what endures and what passes, what brings life and what kills,” he wrote.
Responding to a letter from the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Luciano Fontana, Francis also urged him and all those in the media to “feel the full importance of words.”
“They are never just words: they are facts that shape human environments. They can connect or divide, serve the truth or use it for other ends,” he wrote. “We must disarm words, to disarm minds and disarm the Earth.”
The letter was published as Francis registered slight improvements in his treatment and as the Vatican No. 2, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, shot down any suggestion the pope might resign.
“Absolutely no,” Parolin told journalists on Monday. Parolin has visited Francis twice during his hospitalization, most recently March 2, and said he found Francis better then than his first visit Feb. 25.
Francis is now able to spend some time during the day off high flows of oxygen and use just ordinary supplemental oxygen delivered by a nasal tube, the Holy See press office said. Doctors are also trying to cut back on the amount of time he uses a noninvasive mechanical ventilation mask at night, to force his lungs to work more.
While those amount to “slight improvements,” the Vatican isn’t yet providing any timetable on when he might be released. That said, Buckingham Palace announced Monday that King Charles III was scheduled to meet with Francis on April 8 at the Vatican.
Such state visits are always closely organized with Parolin's office, suggesting that the Holy See believed the pope would be back home by then, barring any setbacks.
The developments came as the Vatican released some details on the first photograph of Francis released since his hospitalization. The image, taken Sunday from behind, showed Francis sitting in his wheelchair in his private chapel in prayer without any sign of nasal tubes.
The photo, showing Francis wearing a Lenten purple stole, followed an audio message Francis recorded March 6 in which he thanked people for their prayers, his voice soft and labored.
Together, they suggested Francis is very much controlling how the public follows his illness to prevent it from turning into a spectacle. While many in the Vatican have held up St. John Paul II’s long and public battle with Parkinson’s disease and other ailments as a humble sign of his willingness to show his frailties, others criticized it as excessive and glorifying sickness.
The image certainly reassured some well-wishers who came to Gemelli to pray for Francis, who is recovering in the 10th floor papal suite reserved for popes.
“After a month of hospitalization, finally a photo that can assure us that his health conditions are better,” said the Rev. Enrico Antonio, a priest from Pescara.
At the Vatican, Sister Mary, a nun from Kenya, said she thought “he looks great.”
“The situation was very critical. But now seeing the photo, it makes me smile. It makes me feel better,” she said. “It makes me even feel safer that the church is still going on, that our pope can come back to us.”
But Benedetta Flagiello of Naples, who was visiting her sister who is a patient at Gemelli, wondered if the photo was even real.
“Because if the pope can sit for a moment without a mask, without anything, why didn’t he look out the window on the 10th floor to be seen by everyone?” she asked. “If you remember our old pope (John Paul II), he couldn’t speak up, but he showed up.”
Paolo Santalucia and Silvia Stellacci contributed.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Faithful pray in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, during a vigil rosary for the recovery of Pope Francis, Monday, March 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
Faithful pray in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, during a vigil rosary for the recovery of Pope Francis, Monday, March 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
FILE - Pope Francis arrives for his weekly general audience in the Paul VI Hall, at the Vatican, Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)
Cardinal Dominique Mamberti prays in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, during a vigil rosary for the recovery of Pope Francis, Monday, March 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
This picture released by the Vatican Press Office shows Pope Francis concelebrating a mass inside his private chapel att the Agostino Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome on Sunday, March 16, 2025. (Vatican Press Office, Via AP )
