USA

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.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says the federal judiciary needs to do more to ensure judges don’t participate in cases where they have financial conflicts of interest.

Roberts made the comments as part of his annual report on the federal judiciary released Friday evening.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Two people were shot and wounded Friday following an apparent altercation at the Mall of America, sending New Year’s Eve shoppers scrambling for safety and placing the Minneapolis mall on temporary lockdown, authorities said.

One man suffered a gunshot wound to the leg during the shooting that happened about 4:30 p.m. on the third floor of the mall and another person was grazed, police said. Shoppers ran for cover and the mall was evacuated until the lockdown ended about 45 minutes later, a mall official said during a news briefing.

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — After tough talk between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin over the Russian troop buildup on the Ukraine border, both sides insist they are hopeful that a pathway to easing tensions could open during diplomatic talks set for January.

But with less than two weeks to go before senior U.S. and Russian officials are to meet in Geneva, the chasm is deep and the prospect of finding an exit to the crisis faces no shortage of complications.

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Workers in Maine’s largest city are getting a big pay raise on Saturday thanks to the hazard pay ordinance.

The pay increases to $19.50 effective Jan. 1 after the Portland City Council postponed action on repealing an emergency pandemic order in December.

The ordinance was enacted in 2020 and was subject to legal and political challenges. The state supreme court upheld the ordinance in July, but said it would not take effect until January 2022.

SUPERIOR, Colo. (AP) — Hundreds of Colorado residents who had expected to ring in 2022 in their homes are instead starting off the new year trying to salvage what remains of them after a wind-whipped wildfire tore through the Denver suburbs.

Families forced to flee the flames with little warning returned to their neighborhoods Friday to find a patchwork of devastation. On some blocks, homes reduced to smoking ruins stood next to ones practically unscathed by the fires.