Multiple earthquakes felt across Texas
The strongest earthquake was a magnitude of 4.3 and hit just outside Amarillo on Wednesday night. Two smaller quakes were also reported on the Louisiana border and near New Mexico’s state line.
The strongest earthquake was a magnitude of 4.3 and hit just outside Amarillo on Wednesday night. Two smaller quakes were also reported on the Louisiana border and near New Mexico’s state line.
In addition to screening bags and patting down passengers at airports all over the country, the Transportation Security Administration has an additional little-known responsibility -- overseeing the security of the nation’s pipeline network, including the Colonial Pipeline targeted last weekend by a ransomware attack. While the TSA employs nearly 50,000 transportation security officers to keep America’s skies secure, the number of TSA personnel devoted to securing 2.7 million miles of pipeline that crisscross the country is surprisingly small. The agency has just 34 staff positions, including headquarters personnel, policy planners and field inspectors, to perform its pipeline and cybersecurity mission, according to a TSA official.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said she was concerned about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's, R-Ga., "perceptions of reality" on Friday, following an episode in which Greene aggressively confronted Ocasio-Cortez, prompting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to suggest an Ethics Committee investigation into Greene's behavior. The Washington Post first reported that Greene confronted Ocasio-Cortez Wednesday night during a vote, shouting her first name repeatedly and asking her why she supported Black Lives Matter and other "terrorists and antifa." "Yeah, no it's--she does keep discussing this, but it's not a thing, and so I'm concerned about her perceptions of reality," Ocasio-Cortez said to reporters Friday.
After 405 days of urging every man, woman and child to wear a mask, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stunned much of the nation this week -- including health experts – with its recommendations that vaccinated Americans can mostly ditch the mask. The decision left businesses, governors and schools scrambling to respond and an emerging hodgepodge of rules for masks, depending upon which state, county or store a person is in. The new CDC proposal also raise serious questions: Can employers require proof of vaccination before a worker goes mask-free?
"Black-ish" has been renewed for an eighth and final season, creator Kenya Barris announced Friday. "In this day and age it is rare to get to decide when your show should come to an end, and we are grateful along with ABC to be able to make this final season exactly what we’d hoped for -- and to do it with the entire and AMAZINGLY STELLAR cast coming back to close this chapter out with us the right way!" Harris said. Barris -- who also created the "Black-ish" spinoffs "Grown-ish" and "Mixed-ish" -- said the sitcom has changed his life and he is "so proud of the conversations we've started along the way."
Dr. Nadia Chaudhri has been battling Stage 3 ovarian cancer for the past year, undergoing a hysterectomy and several rounds of chemotherapy. When Chaudhri, a 43-year-old neuroscientist and professor from Montreal, Canada, was hospitalized again this week, she learned that the cancer had returned. "Once ovarian cancer returns, it’s considered a terminal diagnosis," Chaudhri told "Good Morning America." "There is no treatment.
Rep. Liz Cheney on Friday said she regretted voting for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election given his efforts to overturn his defeat and sow doubt in the integrity of the process. "I was never going to support Joe Biden and I do regret the vote," Cheney told ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl. Cheney, R-Wyo., also blasted House Republicans for elevating Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York to replace her in party leadership, calling it "dangerous" to promote yet another leader who has promoted former President Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student wanted in the killing of a Yale student has been arrested by U.S. Marshals in Alabama after evading authorities for three months. Qinxuan Pan, 29, was arrested in Montgomery Friday morning in connection to the death of 26-year-old Yale graduate student Kevin Jiang in New Haven, Connecticut, on Feb. 6.
Ireland’s health care system was hit by a major ransomware attack on Friday, forcing its health service to shut down its IT systems and locking many hospitals out of their computers, in what one government minister said was possibly the most serious cyber attack in the country's history. The ransomware attack began overnight, targeting Ireland's Health Service Executive which said it had decided to shut down most of its IT systems as a precaution. Many hospitals and clinics reported on Friday they had lost access to their computer systems -- suddenly shut out of patients' records, appointment booking and email systems -- prompting some to cancel most non-urgent appointments.
At least four states and a string of local leaders are holding off on changing their mask mandates following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's new guidance that allows fully vaccinated Americans to go without masks indoors or outdoors. At least seven Democrat-led states -- Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington state -- said they would change their rules to follow the agency's new guidance, hours after it was announced. Local leaders in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., which are all led by Democrats, said Thursday they'd take the new CDC guidance under advisement before adopting.
A Colorado man arrested this month for allegedly murdering his missing wife has also been accused of voting for former President Donald Trump in her name. Barry Morphew, 53, was charged with felony forgery and offenses relating to mail ballots, a misdemeanor, according to court records filed Thursday. Suzanne Morphew, 49, who shared two daughters with her husband, disappeared on May 10, 2020, near the small mountain town of Salida, in Chaffee County.
More than 100 civilians have been killed and over 1,000 wounded as the latest round of fighting between Israel's military and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group ruling the neighboring Gaza Strip, hurtled toward an all-out war with neither side showing any signs of backing down. At least 900 others have been injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Meanwhile, a total of seven people, including a soldier and a 6-year-old, were killed in Israel.
Amid the violence and bloodshed between Israel and Hamas, Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar, an Israeli citizen, said he is scared for his life and is asking for help from international organizations. The leader of the first Palestinian hip-hop group spoke to ABC News from Lod, Israel, the epicenter of the violence, where both Palestinians and Israelis live. Authorities imposed a curfew on the city, but Nafar said even after it went into effect, he could see Israeli settlers walking on the streets with weapons.
A one-time close ally of Rep. Matt Gaetz, former Florida Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, will plead guilty to multiple federal crimes including sex trafficking of a minor, and has agreed to cooperate with federal investigators, according to court papers filed on Friday. Greenberg does not directly name Gaetz in the papers, but he admitted that he and others who are not identified in the document had paid a 17-year-old girl for sex and that he "introduced the minor to other adult men, who engaged in commercial sex acts." Greenberg will plead guilty to six of 33 federal charges he was facing, but the government states they reserve the right to prosecute him on the other charges if he violates any terms of the cooperation deal.
Despite overwhelming data supporting currently authorized vaccines -- all of which were found safe and highly effective in large clinical trials and in real life since FDA authorization -- many Americans have delayed vaccination, citing a range of reasons. Haifa Palazzo, a 68-year-old Ohio grandmother, was skeptical about the vaccine, but while she said she elected to "wait and see, " she said she suffered severe COVID-19, and was hospitalized at the Cleveland Clinic for two months. Now recovered and fully vaccinated, Palazzo encourages anyone who will listen to get their shots.
On Thursday's episode of "The Ellen Degeneres Show," Ellen DeGeneres told the studio audience and viewers watching from home that her show will come to an end after next season. "In 1997 I knew it was time to come out on my sitcom," DeGeneres, 63, said.
Google has taken a public stand in support of immigration rights via a court filing Friday that seeks to protect the ability to work in the U.S. for some 90,000 immigrants, the vast majority of whom are women. Google led a coalition of tech companies in filing an amicus brief (or so-called "friend of the court" document) that supports work authorization for the partners of high-skilled workers who enter the U.S. on H-1B visas. The filing relates to a years-long legal attempt to end the H-4 EAD program, which provides work authorization for spouses of those on the H-1B visa, which is commonly used in the tech industry.
The City of Columbus, Ohio, has agreed to deliver a settlement of $10 million to Andre Hill’s family. Hill, a 47-year-old Black man, was shot to death by former Columbus police officer Adam Coy, who is white, on Dec. 22. Coy has been charged with murder, felonious assault, and reckless homicide in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas.
Ma'Khia Bryant was 16 when she was shot and killed by police outside of her foster home in Columbus, Ohio. Since her death, the Bryant family lawyer, Michelle Martin, said she has had to combat negative portrayals of the teenager, who has been described by her family as "sweet" and "loving." "Everyone wants to see her as an aggressor before we can even see her as a child," Martin said in an interview with ABC News.
The new government guidance that fully vaccinated Americans can return to life without masks marked a turning point for the nation's reopening amid the coronavirus pandemic, but it also sparked many questions, including from parents. Under the new guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fully vaccinated Americans no longer need to wear masks indoors or outdoors, including in crowds. Left behind from the new recommendation are kids ages under the age of 11 who do not yet qualify for a vaccine.
"Tiger King" star Carole Baskin is offering a $5,000 reward for the person who helps find a tiger that has been missing since being spotted in a Houston neighborhood Sunday night. The founder and CEO of Big Cat Rescue shared an Instagram post Thursday in which she offers the sum to "the person responsible for the immediate, safe hand over of India the Tiger." Two of her stipulations are that the tiger be given "to a sanctuary that is accredited by the Global Federation of [Animal] Sanctuaries" and that the "person's efforts with law enforcement is sufficient to convict both the buyer and seller involved in the transfers of the tiger."