Social media companies took action to mitigate the rising spread of misinformation this year. Comedian Sarah Cooper and vegan cook Tabitha Brown amassed a following on TikTok and beyond.
Police in northern Wales are responding to an ongoing incident after a suspicious package was received at a key plant in the U.K.'s vaccine supply chain. The plant in the Wrexham Industrial Estate in north Wales is owned by the Indian pharmaceutical company Wockhardt, who have a partnership with AstraZeneca to manufacture their vaccines in the U.K. "Wockhardt UK in Wrexham this morning received a suspicious package to site," the company said in a statement to ABC News.
FKA twigs is opening up with more allegations of abuse she said she suffered from ex-boyfriend Shia LaBeouf. Speaking Monday on the "Grounded with Louis Theroux" podcast, the 33-year-old said she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks because of her past relationship with the "Transformers" actor. "I felt so controlled and I felt so confused and I felt so low," FKA twigs, born Tahliah Barnett, said, alleging that LaBeouf forced her to live a "contained life."
The Washington Football Team made NFL history Tuesday when they added Jennifer King to their roster as assistant running backs coach. King, who has been a trailblazer on and off the gridiron, is the first Black woman to coach full time in the league. King joined "Good Morning America" on Wednesday and described the moment she got the big news from head coach Ron Rivera, and how she had prepared herself for success leading up to that moment.
President Joe Biden is set to take a series of actions on climate change on his seventh full day in office, fulfilling campaign promises such as freezing new oil and gas leasing on federal land and kicking off his ambitious agenda to reduce greenhouse gas emissions -- making tackling climate change a priority across the federal government. Biden’s actions Wednesday will follow up on several climate-related executive orders he signed in his first few days in office, including rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate, and revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. In addition to Biden’s domestic policy priorities on climate, the order would set climate change as a key consideration for U.S. national security and foreign policy.
The first storm is leaving the Northeast this morning and this is the same storm that brought the deadly EF-3 tornado with winds of 150 mph to northern Alabama. On Tuesday, a 17 vehicle pileup shut down I-25 in Colorado due to the slick roads from that second storm with, locally, some areas in the West already getting 3 feet of snow. On Wednesday, 16 states in the East are under snow and ice alerts for heavy snow and slick roads.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, President Joe Biden's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, faces her Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, vowing to bring back "genuine, old-fashioned, people-to-people diplomacy," according to her prepared remarks obtained by ABC News. Thomas-Greenfield, a career ambassador who retired from the Foreign Service in 2017 as the top U.S. diplomat for Africa and former U.S. envoy to Liberia, will also promise a tougher line on China, according to her prepared testimony, as the Biden administration faces pressure from Republicans to take a hard line against Beijing and its growing global ambition.
Scientists around the world are on the lookout for new COVID-19 variants, which are caused by mutations of the virus when its replication machinery makes an error. Experts say these mutations and the new variants are normal and to be expected. In recent months, so-called variants of concern have been identified in the U.K., South Africa, Brazil and in the U.S. And it's not a coincidence they're appearing in these countries, which have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of COVID-19 cases.
Vaccine recipients typically experience minimal side effects -- the most common being temporary pain and swelling at the injection site, fevers, chills, tiredness, muscle aches and pains and headaches. While these side effects are generally a minor nuisance to most people, some attempt to prevent them by taking common over-the-counter pain relievers like acetaminophen (Tylenol) or ibuprofen (e.g., Motrin, Advil) beforehand. “We do not recommend premedication with ibuprofen or Tylenol before COVID-19 vaccines due to the lack of data on how it impacts the vaccine-induced antibody responses,” Dr. Simone Wildes, an infectious disease specialist at South Shore Medical Center and a member of Massachusetts’ COVID-19 Vaccine Advisory Group, told ABC News.
While the push to get vaccines in arms proceeds across the country, preliminary data has emerged in the use of lab-created monoclonal antibodies as a treatment for COVID-19. The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced Tuesday that its combination of two antibodies had proven effective in COVID-19 patients at high risk of severe infection, reducing the risk of hospitalization and death by 70%, according to results of a final-stage trial. It comes the same day as another drug company, Regeneron, announced that its monoclonal cocktail had shown positive initial results in being used prophylactically, helping ward off the virus in those who may have been exposed to the virus.
Working remotely amid a pandemic has been complicated for the average person, but for officials involved in the transition from the administrations of Donald Trump to Joe Biden, it poses a serious national security risk, according to an internal federal intelligence analysis obtained by ABC News. The report, issued by the Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Mission and Counterintelligence Mission centers in mid-January, warns that based on previous cyberattacks targeting political campaigns between 2018-2020, foreign cyber actors -- specifically American adversaries like Russia -- are "very likely" to target transition officials' "government transition e-mail accounts and associated personal e-mail accounts." Among the concerns detailed in the report is the risk that nation-state hackers sanctioned by foreign governments will likely look to take advantage of transition officials "conducting a significant portion of the transition remotely rather than in face-to-face interactions as a result of COVID-19 restrictions."
Tamika Parrish tested positive for COVID-19 in August. Six months later, Parrish, a mom of 4-year-old twins, is still suffering from two of the most common symptoms associated with the virus: loss of taste and smell. While Parrish had other symptoms of COVID-19, like body aches and fatigue, she said those went away after about two weeks, while the loss of her senses has remained.
If you were one of the many resolutioners who kicked off Whole30 -- the 30-day program that eliminates food groups like sugar, grains, dairy and legumes -- on Jan. 1, congratulations. Now comes the even more important part, according to Brooke Brennan, a certified health coach and mother of two from Florida who undertook Whole30 in January, too, for her fourth time following the program. The next 10 days -- what Whole30 calls the reintroduction phase -- can determine whether all the hard work was worth it.
Fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli will spend the rest of his sentence behind bars after a judge in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal denied his request for compassionate release. Earlier this month, Giannulli's attorney filed a motion for the designer to complete his sentence at home after spending 56 days in solitary quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemic, which his lawyer said took a significant toll on his "mental, physical and emotional well-being." "The conditions under which Mr. Giannulli has been incarcerated are far more extreme than what the Court recommended," Giannulli's attorney wrote in a bid to modify the prison sentence.
"I was stunned at the tepid response from Department of the Army, which was reluctant to send the D.C. National Guard to the Capitol," acting Metropolitan Police Department Chief Robert Contee told the House Appropriations Committee in written testimony obtained by ABC News. "I was able to quickly deploy my force and issue directives to them while they were in the field, and I was honestly shocked that the National Guard could not -- or would not -- do the same," he added. Contee spoke to the deadly toll of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, noting that five people -- including Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick -- died as a result of the siege.
The article of impeachment accusing former President Donald Trump of "incitement of insurrection" has now been sent from the House to the Senate. There will be arguments from constitutional scholars over whether a former president can be tried on impeachment, but another more political debate has surfaced over doing so in this moment of time in America. Many in the GOP have settled on the talking point that holding Trump to account for his words and actions is going to divide the country even further and is in opposition to President Joe Biden's message of unity and healing.
A former North Carolina police officer who was fired and criminally charged last year after he allegedly gathered a group of armed people and tried to enter the home of a Black teen who he thought was a suspect in the case of a missing person, has been sued by the victim's family Tuesday. Attorneys for Monica Shepard and her 18-year-old son Dameon filed the civil suit in North Carolina Tuesday contending that their clients were racially profiled and terrorized by former deputy Jordan Kita, and 14 other white defendants, some of whom were armed, who said they were looking for a missing woman. Kita was off-duty but in uniform and had his sidearm when he came to the Shepard's Pender County home on May 3, 2020, along with the group, according to the suit.
In the span of just few months, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio went from openly discussing his plans to help Republicans defend the 2022 Senate map, to announcing he would not seek reelection and instead plans to retire at the end of his term. While the news shocked his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill, the announcement also signaled the starting point of another competitive campaign cycle. Portman is the third Republican senator from a key swing state to announce his retirement -- Sens.
Matt Mauser is a musician and songwriter based in Southern California. In January 2020, he lost his wife, Christina, in the same helicopter crash that took the lives of NBA icon Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna. Mauser continues to perform while raising his three children, Penny, 13, Tom, 11, and Ivy, 5, and he has launched The Christina Mauser Foundation, which supports single mothers, women and girls in sports through scholarships and other financial aid.
A Wisconsin pharmacist pleaded guilty to two federal charges Tuesday and admitted that he tampered with over 500 doses of a coronavirus vaccine, the Department of Justice announced. Steven Brandenburg, 46, of Grafton, Wisconsin, faces up to 20 years in person on two counts of attempting to tamper with consumer products with reckless disregard for the risk that another person will be placed in danger of death or bodily injury, the Justice Department said in a statement. Brandenburg admitted to removing 57 vials of the Moderna vaccine from cold storage at Advocate Aurora Health Hospital on Dec. 24 and Dec. 25, leaving them out to spoil overnight, according to federal prosecutors.
With California ending a regional stay-at-home order issued because of strained capacity in the state's intensive care units, current COVID-19 data suggests that the local Latino community has been hit the hardest of all. The state reported 4,131 ICU-related COVID cases last month, which has since increased to 4,475. California, as of Tuesday, also reported more than 27,000 new cases and at least 328 deaths.
