North America

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Twitter said Sunday it had banned the personal account of far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for multiple violations of the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy, the latest strike against the firebrand whose embrace of conspiracy theories has been called “a cancer” for the GOP and led the House to boot her from committees.

(AP) --- A winter storm packing heavy snow was blowing into the nation’s capital on Monday, closing government offices and schools with fierce winds and as much as 10 inches of snow forecast for the District of Columbia, northern Virginia and central Maryland through the afternoon.

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for the area until 4 p.m. EST Monday. Wind gusts of up to 35 mph (56 kph) were forecast, and travel was expected to be very difficult because of the hazardous conditions, the weather service said.

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — After an extended holiday break, the jury weighing fraud charges against former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes will get back to work Monday.

The eight men and four women who will determine Holmes’ fate spent much of their holiday season behind closed doors in a San Jose, California, courthouse, weighing reams of evidence presented during a three-month trial that captivated Silicon Valley.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden’s arrival in the White House nearly a year ago seemed to herald a historic shift toward less U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons and possibly a shrinking of their numbers. Even an American “no first use” pledge — a promise to never again be the first to use a nuclear weapon — seemed possible.

Then China happened — revelations about its expanding nuclear force and talk of potential war with Taiwan.

And then Russia happened — signs that it might be preparing to invade Ukraine.

LOUISVILLE, Colo. (AP) — Search teams looked for two missing people in the smoldering debris from a massive Colorado wildfire while people who escaped the flames sorted through the charred remnants of their homes to see what was left.

Investigators were still trying to determine what caused flames to tear through at least 9.4 square miles (24 square kilometers), leaving nearly 1,000 houses and other buildings destroyed in suburbs between Denver and Boulder.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden has gotten the same troubling questions from worried world leaders, ones that he never thought he would hear.

“Is America going to be all right?” they ask. “What about democracy in America?”

While Biden has tried to offer America’s allies assurances, he has only occasionally emphasized the gravity of the threat to democracy from the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and the repeated lie from the man he defeated, Donald Trump, that the 2020 election was stolen.

WASHINGTON (AP) — As the COVID-19 omicron variant surges across the United States, top federal health officials are looking to add a negative test along with its five-day isolation restrictions for asymptomatic Americans who catch the coronavirus, the White House’s top medical adviser said Sunday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now considering including the negative test as part of its guidance after getting significant “pushback” on its updated recommendations last week.

31 Dec 2021; MEMO: The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has rejected applications from hundreds of Afghans seeking temporary entry into the United States on humanitarian grounds, Anadolu reported.

Media outlets have reported that hundreds of Afghans who were separated from their families and were threatened by the Taliban in recent weeks had applied for humanitarian visas to move to the United States, but their requests were rejected.

31 Dec 2021; MEMO: An Israeli multinational pharmaceutical company has been found guilty by an American Jury of fuelling the deadly drug crisis in New York. A lawsuit filed by the state's attorney general in 2019 accused Teva and other firms of aggressively marketing painkillers across the state, while doing nothing to minimise addiction.

OTTAWA, Dec. 31 (Xinhua) -- Canada is going through its worst spike in COVID-19 cases yet, driven by the Omicron variant, with 41,210 new cases reported on Friday evening, an all-time high for daily cases since the pandemic hit the country in February 2020.

The latest cases raised the country's cumulative caseload to 2,183,527, With 30,319 deaths, according to CTV news.

Over the past weeks, the country's daily case counts have been rising due to the fast spread of the Omicron variant.