Stories by Associated Press

The U.S. on Tuesday hit another depressing pandemic milestone — 800,000 deaths. It’s a sad coda to a year that held so much promise with the arrival of vaccines but is ending in heartbreak for the many grieving families trying to navigate the holiday season.

China dismissed the decision by Canada and the United Kingdom to join Washington’s diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games as a “farce.” 

The only Black juror on the panel that convicted Jussie Smollett of lying to Chicago police said he couldn't get past what the actor did not do after he claimed attackers looped a noose around his neck: Rip it off and keep it off.

As searches continued for those still missing, efforts also turned to repairing the power grid, sheltering those whose homes were destroyed and delivering drinking water and other supplies.

OSHA inspectors, who have been at the site since Saturday, will look into whether workplace safety rules were followed and will have six months to complete the investigation, said spokesperson Scott Allen.

The NBA postponed the Chicago Bulls’ next two games on Monday, with 10 of the team’s players in the league’s health and safety protocols.

A federal docket entry on Monday showed that a hearing has been scheduled for Wednesday for Derek Chauvin to change his current not-guilty plea in the case. These types of notices indicate a defendant is planning to plead guilty. 

The nation’s COVID-19 death toll stands at around 800,000 as the anniversary of the U.S. vaccine rollout arrives. A year ago, it stood at 300,000. 

After an extraordinary second quarter in which the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears exchanged body blows, the NFL’s oldest rivalry returned to normal, with Aaron Rodgers once again delivering a knockout punch.

The company has not said how many people were in the building not far from St. Louis when the tornado hit at 8:35 p.m. Friday — part of a swarm of twisters across the Midwest and the South that leveled entire communities. Authorities said they didn’t have a full count of employees because it was during a shift change and there were several part-time employees.

Rescuers in an increasingly bleak search picked through the tornado-splintered ruins of homes and businesses Sunday, including a candle factory that was bustling with night-shift employees when it was flattened, as Kentucky’s governor warned the state’s death toll from the outbreak could top 100.

Tornadoes and severe weather caused catastrophic damage across multiple states late Friday, killing at least six people overnight as a storm system tore through a candle factory in Kentucky, an Amazon facility in Illinois and a nursing home in Arkansas. The Kentucky governor said he feared dozens more could be dead.

Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were tried on murder charges about a month after Emmett Till was killed, but an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them. 

The rallies before and during the Jan. 6 riot are a major focus of the committee’s investigation. Committee members have said they want to know who financed the events and whether organizers were in close touch with the White House and members of Congress as they planned the events.

The court acted more than a month after hearing arguments over the law, which makes no exceptions for rape or incest.

Displaying a bipartisanship rare in modern government, politicians in office and out came together to pay homage to Bob Dole’s hard-scrabble rise from wounded war veteran to Senate stalwart to three-time, unsuccessful presidential candidate.

A jury’s guilty verdict that Jussie Smollett faked a racist and homophobic attack isn’t the end of legal proceedings for the former “Empire” actor or others.

Economists are now voicing a more discouraging message: Higher prices will likely last well into next year, if not beyond.

The jury convicted the 39-year-old on five counts of disorderly conduct — for each separate time he was charged with lying to police in the days after the alleged attack. He was acquitted on a sixth count.

The U.S. and many other nations already were urging adults to get booster shots to pump up immunity that can wane months after vaccination, calls that intensified with the discovery of the worrisome new omicron variant.

The deliberations began after a roughly one-week trial in which two brothers testified that Jussie Smollett recruited them to fake the attack near his home in downtown Chicago in January 2019.

A major outage in Amazon’s cloud computing network Tuesday severely disrupted services at a wide range of U.S. companies for hours, raising questions about the vulnerability of the internet and its concentration in the hands of a few firms.

New cases in the U.S. climbed from an average of nearly 95,000 a day on Nov. 22 to almost 119,000 a day this week, and hospitalizations are up 25% from a month ago. 

Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said that while two doses may not be protective enough to prevent infection, lab tests showed a booster increased by 25-fold people’s levels of virus-fighting antibodies. 

With tens of thousands of Russian troops massed on the Ukraine border, the highly anticipated call between the two leaders came amid growing worries by the U.S. and Western allies about Russia’s threat to its neighbor.

A few dozen survivors of Pearl Harbor are expected to gather Tuesday at the site of the Japanese bombing to remember those killed in the attack that launched the U.S. into World War II. They will observe a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m., the same minute the attack began decades ago.