Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the nation's leading public health advisers, told Savannah Guthrie on NBC's "TODAY" show that he is often asked if it's safe to get together without some of the public health measures like masking and social distancing.

“The answer, ultimately, is going to be yes,” he said during the interview Thursday.

However, that's if everyone in the group is fully vaccinated. Fauci urged more caution if only one party has received the vaccine, since people who have been vaccinated could potentially harbor virus in their nose and transmit it to others.

“That's the reason why we say, until we have the overwhelming majority of people vaccinated, and the level of virus is very low, if you're vaccinated, it would be prudent to wear a mask,” Fauci said.

France’s government wants to set the age of sexual consent at 15 and make it easier to punish long-ago child sexual abuse, amid growing public pressure and a wave of online testimonies about rape and other sexual violence by parents and authority figures.

“Finally!” was the refrain Wednesday from victims and child protection activists who have long pushed for tougher laws and greater societal recognition of the problem.

“An act of sexual penetration by an adult on a minor under 15 will be considered a rape,” Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti said Tuesday on France-2 television. Perpetrators could no longer cite consent to diminish the charges, he said, though exceptions would be made for teenagers having consensual sex.

I have a daughter who is very depressed and suffers from anxiety and outbursts of anger. She is trying medication and also sees a psychologist regularly. We are just trying to manage things the best we can for her. We even welcomed a puppy into our family to hopefully help lower her anxiety. However, most interactions, even the most basic of topics, are strained and difficult with her. She is always seeking out any way possible to push back on everything we say or be argumentative. She is a smart, beautiful girl and is quite developed for her age. My question is: What is the best way to discuss dressing appropriately with her? She makes fairly good choices for school except for the odd midriff (which is not worth the argument). At home she dresses in short shorts that are far too revealing and often a shirt that is low cut.

We have always had the family rule that we must always be dressed or wear pajamas around the house for the respect of ourselves and others in our family. My sons have both said they are uncomfortable when their sister wears this inappropriate attire. Our family is quite progressive, and we want to see the societal norms around labeling women by how they’re dressed change for the better. When we have brought up our daughter’s dress, she has sharply retorted that how can we judge her for having legs, and why should she have to cover up her perfectly natural body. In some ways, I agree, but that is the perfect attitude for living alone, not in a small house with four other people. Please help me with the right words to reach her.

—Mystified Mother

Target will no longer sell coconut milk made by the Thai company Chaokoh after an investigation alleged the drink is tied to forced monkey labor, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced Monday.

“By dropping Chaokoh, Target is joining thousands of stores that refuse to profit from chained monkeys’ misery,” PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman wrote in a statement.

The parents of an 8-year-old student who killed himself after being persistently bullied can move forward with a lawsuit against the Cincinnati school district that alleges wrongful death and other charges, a federal appeals panel ruled Tuesday.

The lawsuit's allegations also charge school officials with intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress and failure to report child abuse. The lawsuit says Taye was bullied at his elementary school starting in first grade, with the bullying escalating in his third grade year.

Other students punched and kicked him in assaults and on Jan. 24, 2017, knocked him unconscious by throwing him against a bathroom wall, the parents say in the lawsuit.

He stayed home sick the next day, returned to school Jan. 26 and was bullied again in the bathroom by students who took his water bottle and tried to flush it down the toilet, his parents say. He killed himself that evening in his bedroom.

Religious orders are supposed to provide spiritual guidance to those who join. But some of the women who entered Sisters Minor of Mary Immaculate (SMMI) say they faced physical and emotional abuse.

Patricia Budd, one of the former nuns of SMMI, first entered in 1995 in hopes of connecting with her Catholicism. It was at her first retreat where she met the order’s U.S. delegate, Sister Theresa Kovacs.

“It was a lot of hugs. There was a lot of encouragement,” Budd told HuffPost. “They would listen to you, and you felt really important, and you felt like you’re valued.” But soon after she joined, Budd and the other nuns realized things were not as they seemed.

“I witnessed other girls just being yelled at on a constant basis by Theresa Kovacs,” said Rose, who joined SMMI in 1995. (Three interviewees asked to only be identified by their first names.) According to Rose, a sister named Georgiana often got the brunt of Kovacs’ anger.

“It would be a torrent of the nastiest stuff you could ever say to a human being, she would say to me,” said Georgiana. “It was meant to keep people in line.”

The nuns faced strict rules. They weren’t allowed to speak to each other. They weren’t allowed to go for walks outside the convent doors.

“Basically your food is pretty much less and less,” she said. “And so, that’s pretty much like what a cult is — and break you down. That’s the whole thing. Always to break you down.”

The support for nurses demonstrating outside South Coast Global Medical Center is clear. It was one of four protests at Orange County hospitals.
Nurses say that their safety and patient lives are at risk after the state allowed their hospital, part of KPC Health, to increase the patient to nurse ratio in the middle of a pandemic.

"So instead of giving us more nurses we got more work. Patients are going to die, nurses are gonna break, nurses are exhausted," says Karen Rodriguez, a registered nurse.

Nurses say that they are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, shifts go as long as 16 hours, four to five days a week, code after code, leaving them exhausted, waking up anxious in the middle of the night.

"It might be surge after surge and who knows, and they're not preparing for the worst," says Irene Brown, South Coast Global Medical Center ICU nurse

"I don't have any more to give when I get home, and that's really unfair to my family and myself because I just want to rest," says Vanessa Aguilar

She says it's also unfair to patients. Aguilar had this heartbreaking admission: Some may have made it if we had more resources.

The UK government has said it is “highly concerned” about two cases of a new mutation of the coronavirus which have been identified in people who have arrived from South Africa.

In October, as the pandemic’s winter surge was beginning to take shape across the U.S., California’s public-health researchers and officials expressed measured optimism that the nation’s most populous state could avoid a disastrous rise in cases. During a press conference on October 19, Governor Gavin Newsom pointed to declining hospitalization rates as a sign of the state’s success, but also warned that the decline was slowing. “We’re beginning to flatten out, plateau, as relates to hospitalizations,” he said.

For a moment, such a plateau seemed like the most likely outcome. A week after Newsom’s press conference, the state had 2,991 people hospitalized with COVID-19, its lowest number since April 10. But the trend quickly reversed, and by November 23, the state’s hospitalizations had doubled to more than 6,000.

What’s happened since is a worst-case scenario. While California’s per capita hospitalization rate is nowhere near New York at its worst—with 39.5 million people, the Golden State is about twice as populous as New York—the sheer number of patients in the hospital is still a sign of how badly California is doing right now.

Worse yet is how quickly the state reached nearly 18,000 hospitalizations during its current surge. When New York reached its record, it represented a 12 percent increase over the week prior. In California, by contrast, hospitalizations are up 27 percent over last week. With cases in California continuing to rise, more hospitalizations will follow.

Things are much worse in some parts of the state than others. Southern and central California are driving the current surge: 34 percent of the state’s hospitalized patients are in Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous by far. Yesterday, 620 people per million were hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 there, the fifth-highest rate among California counties.

Andrew Cuomo on Sunday slammed the 'reprehensible' inaction as the United States 'continues to let in six flights a day' from Britain, where a new coronavirus strain is spreading - as more countries, including Canada, ban flights from the UK.

The New York governor told reporters: 'Right now, this variant in the UK is getting on a plane and flying to JFK. Right now. Today. Literally six flights a day. And all it takes is one person.'

Authorities had earlier said they were looking 'very carefully' into the virus variant spreading in the United Kingdom, while indicating that a ban on travel from there was not currently in the cards.

Orange County continued its streak of daily records for COVID-19 hospitalizations on Thursday with 1,519 patients, including 343 in ICU beds.

The county’s adjusted ICU bed capacity remains at zero.

The state created the adjusted metric to reflect the difference in beds available for COVID-19 patients and non-coronavirus patients. The county’s unadjusted ICU bed capacity is also dropping, and it currently stands at 9.5%.


The 11-county Southern California region’s adjusted percentage of available ICU beds dropped from 0.5% to zero as well.

Another 13 people died from virus-related complications, the county reported Thursday. The death toll is now at 1,731.

Tyson Foods has fired seven plant management employees after an independent investigation into claims that leaders at the company bet on how many workers would become infected with COVID-19, the company announced Wednesday. The allegations against managers at the Waterloo, Iowa, plant were part of a lawsuit filed by the son of an employee who died of the coronavirus in April.

"We value our people and expect everyone on the team, especially our leaders, to operate with integrity and care in everything we do," Tyson Foods President and CEO Dean Banks said in a statement. "The behaviors exhibited by these individuals do not represent the Tyson core values, which is why we took immediate and appropriate action to get to the truth. Now that the investigation has concluded, we are taking action based on the findings."

The lawsuit, filed in early November, alleges that the plant manager of the Waterloo facility "organized a cash buy-in, winner-take-all betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many employees would test positive for COVID-19."

Surgeon General Jerome Adams said on Monday morning that people still had to wear masks and socially distance once they are vaccinated against COVID-19 because they can still pass on the virus.

While it has been proven to be 94% effective in preventing severe illness from the virus, it has not yet been proven to be a full proof means of preventing infection.

More study needs to be done before that can be known for certain, Adams said.

Intensive care nurse Sandra Lindsay received the first Pfizer shot in the U.S. at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens just before 9.30am this morning during a livestream with New York Gov Andrew Cuomo.

The vaccine will be rolled out gradually until around February and March, when it'll become widely available to the general public.

But even then, millions are skeptical about taking it. It means the virus could still circulate for months after millions of Americans become immunized against it.

Wisconsinites and fans of uncooked meat, here is your annual holiday health warning.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services is urging residents to put down their cannibal sandwiches, also known as raw meat sandwiches, tiger meat or steak tartare.

"Many Wisconsin families consider them to be a holiday tradition, but eating them poses a threat for Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7, Campylobacter and Listeria bacteria that can make you sick," the department wrote in a Facebook post Saturday, which it called its annual reminder. "Remember, ground beef should ALWAYS be cooked to an internal temperature of 160° F."

The amount of COVID-19 virus measured in the Palm Springs Wastewater Treatment Plant increased by more than 700% throughout November, according to new data published by the city. And samples collected this week suggest that about 5,800 people in Palm Springs could currently be infected with the virus.

According to Riverside County, Palm Springs has had 1,626 coronavirus cases confirmed via diagnostic tests since the start of the pandemic and 67 deaths. The city has about 48,000 people.

Riverside County reported more than 18,000 new COVID-19 cases from Tuesday to Thursday. From Dec. 1 to Dec. 7, it reported about 7,400.