Friday, Jul 19th
Last update09:17:57 PM GMT
Her departure comes as the federal government is winding down its response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The public health emergency that was declared in January 2020 is ending May 11. The World Health Organization said Friday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency.
In announcing Walensky's departure, Biden said she led a complex organization that was on the frontlines of a once-in-a-generation pandemic — and she did it with honesty and integrity.
WHO said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic hasn’t come to an end, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The U.N. health agency says that thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week.
“It’s with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” he said, adding he wouldn’t hesitate to reconvene experts to reassess the situation should COVID-19 “put our world in peril.”
Dominion executives hope all of the text messages between Fox News hosts including Tucker Carlson that they discovered as part of their defamation lawsuit will one day become public.
Dominion, the company behind voting machines that Donald Trump's camp claimed were rigged in the 2020 election, sued Fox for airing the former president's claims.
As part of the lawsuit discovery, Dominion's lawyers uncovered texts in which Fox hosts and journalists seemed to acknowledge that the fraud claims were not true or farfetched, but gave them airtime anyway.
n their first interview since the lawsuit was settled unexpectedly, Dominion's CEO John Poulos and Stephen Shackelford, a lawyer who was involved in the case, told Axios they now want the full record to become unredacted.
A Southern California man who assaulted police with pepper spray during the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison, federal authorities announced.
Jeffrey Scott Brown, 56, of Santa Ana received a sentence of 54 months in federal prison for felony and misdemeanor charges related to the mob attack by supporters of former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a Friday press statement.
More than 1,000 individuals have been arrested, including more than 320 people who have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, the DOJ said. Trump supporters that day tried to stop Congress from certifying presidential election results for Joe Biden, a Democrat, over Trump, a Republican.
Brown and two co-defendants were found guilty at trial in December.
Abortion bans in deeply conservative Nebraska and South Carolina each fell a single vote short of passing in their legislatures amid heated debates among Republicans, yet another sign that abortion is becoming a difficult issue for the GOP.
As the last vote was cast in Nebraska, where abortion is currently banned after 20 weeks of pregnancy, cheers erupted outside the legislative chamber, with opponents of the bill waving signs and chanting, "Whose house? Our house!"
In South Carolina, Republican Sen. Sandy Senn criticized Majority Leader Shane Massey for repeatedly "taking us off a cliff on abortion."
"The only thing that we can do when you all, you men in the chamber, metaphorically keep slapping women by raising abortion again and again and again, is for us to slap you back with our words," she said.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol treated President Joe Biden and fellow dinner guests to a rendition of Don McLean's "American Pie" at the White House Wednesday night.
It was the nightcap to a packed day for the two heads of state, who earlier announced their Washington Declaration on nuclear deterrence and signaled strengthening economic ties.
But at home, Yoon faces criticism for pushing anti-feminist legislation and growing the relationship between South Korea and Japan.
Who is he? Yoon Suk Yeol, 62, is the President of South Korea. He began his five-year term last May.
Ukraine's Volodymr Zelensky says he has had a "long and meaningful" phone call with China's Xi Jinping, their first contact since Russia's war began.
He said on Twitter he believed the call, along with the appointment of an ambassador to Beijing, would "give a powerful impetus to the development of our bilateral relations".
China confirmed the call, adding that it "always stood on the side of peace".
Unlike the West, Beijing has sought to appear neutral on the Russian invasion.
But it has never hidden its close ties to Moscow, or condemned the invasion, and last month President Xi paid a two-day state visit to Russia.
Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and wide-ranging activist, has died aged 96. The cause of death was congestive heart failure, his spokesman told the New York Times.
As well as performing global hits such as Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), winning a Tony award for acting and appearing in numerous feature films, Belafonte spent his life fighting for a variety of causes. He bankrolled numerous 1960s initiatives to bring civil rights to Black Americans; campaigned against poverty, apartheid and Aids in Africa; and supported leftwing political figures such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
Belafonte was born in 1927 in working-class Harlem, New York, and spent eight years of his childhood in his impoverished parents’ native Jamaica. He returned to New York for high school but struggled with dyslexia and dropped out in his early teens. He took odd jobs working in markets and the city’s garment district, and then signed up to the US navy aged 17 in March 1944, working as a munitions loader at a base in New Jersey.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey on Friday announced she replaced her director of early childhood education over the use of a teacher training book, written by a nationally recognized education group, that the Republican governor denounced as teaching "woke concepts" because of language about inclusion and structural racism.
Barbara Cooper was forced out as as head of the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education after Ivey expressed concern over the distribution of the book to state-run pre-kindergartens. Ivey spokesperson Gina Maiola identified the book as the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) Developmentally Appropriate Practice Book, 4th edition. Maiola said she understands that the books have been removed from the state classrooms.
"The education of Alabama's children is my top priority as governor, and there is absolutely no room to distract or take away from this mission. Let me be crystal clear: Woke concepts that have zero to do with a proper education and that are divisive at the core have no place in Alabama classrooms at any age level, let alone with our youngest learners," Ivey said in a statement.
Page 75 of 1139
