The Week

Matt Gaetz blew up FBI extortion case to distract from underage sex report, ex-DOJ official and NYT reporter suggest

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) did not deny Tuesday night that the Justice Department is investigating him for sex trafficking, related to his alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl two years ago, but he did say in a bizarre Fox News interview that the 17-year-old girl does not exist, that he had no sexual relationships with minors, and, oddly, that there are no “pictures of me with child prostitutes.” Gaetz also elaborated on his allegation that a former Justice Department official was trying to extort him to make the “horrible

WASHINGTON — President Biden announced on Thursday that he would double his initial goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in office. Having already reached that goal last week, he announced a new one, vowing to vaccinate 200 million by April 30, when he will reach the 100-day benchmark historically used to assess a president’s opening agenda.

“I know it’s ambitious,” Biden said at the beginning of his first press conference since taking office. “Twice our original goal. But no other country in the world has even come close — not even close — to what we’re doing. And I believe we can do it.”

Biden has

It’s official: After falling for more than two straight months, the average number of daily COVID-19 cases across the U.S. has begun — just barely — to rise again, inching up from a low of 54,059 earlier this week to 57,322 on Wednesday.

In emerging hot spots such as Michigan, meanwhile, the pattern is more pronounced. There, cases have soared by 121 percent over the last two weeks, and hospitalizations are up by 81 percent over the same period.

So is this the start of the variant-driven “fourth wave” that Americans have been fearing ever since the end of our horrific holiday surge?

The answer, reassuringly, appears to be no — at

WASHINGTON — Officials from the across the Biden administration gathered virtually on Wednesday to push schools to reopen for in-person instruction, hoping to meet the president’s goal of opening the majority of elementary and middle schools by the end of April.

What was billed as the “National Safe School Reopening Summit” began with first lady Jill Biden, a professor of education, relating her own feelings about remote instruction. “It just isn’t the same,” she said, raising her hands in a show of teacherly frustration.

She then told a story that seemed to not-all-that-subtly capture the Biden administration’s predicament when it comes to the resistance of some districts to reopening classrooms. Meeting

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is optimistic about the results of a clinical trial showing the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca to be 79 percent effective at preventing symptomatic illness and 100 percent effective against severe disease requiring hospitalization.

White House coronavirus adviser Andy Slavitt called the development “encouraging” during a pandemic-related press briefing on Monday morning. AstraZeneca had released the results of its trial, which enrolled nearly 35,000 people, mostly in the U.S., just hours earlier.

In a key finding, the trial found that the AstraZeneca vaccine did not cause people to develop blood clots. Last week, several European countries temporarily stopped using that vaccine because three dozen people developed

This is part of a Yahoo News series honoring some of the American lives lost to COVID-19. Their stories are told by family and friends, who were left to deal with their often sudden and painful deaths.

Kathy Ann Weldon, 63, of Salem, Mo., died on Jan. 24, 2021, after becoming ill with COVID-19. She’s among the more than 500,000 Americans who have lost their lives to the disease since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic early last year.

Her husband of 28 years, Randy Weldon, told Yahoo News that his wife was a loving mother, grandmother and the love of his life.

Kathy Weldon was a medical technologist who worked in

Forget herd immunity. In Europe this week it appeared “herd mentality” was the dominating force in the battle against COVID-19.

On Monday, Germany raised a red flag, temporarily suspending use of the AstraZeneca vaccine so that it could investigate possible links to blood clots after seven cases of thrombosis occurred in the 1.6 million patients inoculated with that vaccine in Germany; three cases proved fatal. In response, another dozen European countries marched behind Berlin, dropping that vaccine to further investigate and effectively halting already anemic COVID immunization programs.

To date, less than 5 percent of citizens in Europe have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19, compared to 13 percent in the U.S.