Jaclyn Diaz

Australia has asked the European Commission to review Italy's decision to block a shipment of Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines to the Pacific Island nation this week.

The recently ousted CEO of the entity that maintains and operates much of Texas's electricity grid has told its board of directors he will not accept an $800,000 severance.

Bill Magness was fired, officially without cause, Wednesday. He had been president and CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, but was removed following last month's winter storm that resulted in days-long blackouts for more than 4 million Texas residents.

Updated at 12:22 p.m. ET

In her time as former President Donald Trump's transportation secretary, Elaine Chao repeatedly used her position and agency staff to help family members who run a shipping business with ties to China, in potential violation of federal ethics laws, according to an Office of Inspector General report.

A judge sentenced former NFL tight end Kellen Winslow II to 14 years in prison Wednesday for rapes and other sexual offenses against several women in Southern California.

San Diego County Superior Court Judge Blaine Bowman, who presided over Winslow's trial, called the former player "a sexual predator," according to news reports.

Dutch police in a town north of Amsterdam are investigating an explosion outside of a coronavirus test center early Wednesday.

Police say the explosion went off at about 6:55 a.m. outside of the center in Bovenkarspel, a town about 40 miles northeast of Amsterdam. There were no injuries from the blast. Investigators told local media that the explosion appeared intentional, as remnants of an exploded metal cylinder were found outside of the building.

There may be light at the end of the tunnel for the pandemic, but one piece of the virus will live on.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who became the public face of the government's coronavirus response with daily press conferences and media interviews, on Tuesday donated his personal model of the SARS-CoV-2 virion to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The model will be housed within the national medicine and science collections.

Many residents of Jackson, Miss., remain without running water three weeks after a winter storm hit the city.

The water outages in Jackson began Feb. 15 as a winter storm swept across the state. The storm brought devastating, bitter cold to the South and hit the region's critical infrastructure hard--highlighting major vulnerabilities in the area's power grid and water system.

More than 275 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped last Friday have been returned safely, government officials say.

The Nigerian government has denied paying a ransom for the girls, and officials have not said who's responsible. It's unclear whether the captors were arrested.

The government initially said 317 girls were abducted, but today revised the number to 279 without explanation. They were taken from their beds at the Government Girls Science Secondary School in the town of Jangebe.

The largest power cooperative in Texas filed for bankruptcy protection Monday, citing a massive bill from the state's electricity grid operator following last month's winter storm that left millions of residents without power for days.

Brazos Electric Power Cooperative filed for Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, according to court documents reviewed by NPR.

Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama voting to unionize won the backing of an important executive.

Without naming the massive e-commerce company specifically, President Biden said in a video posted late Sunday that he supports the organizing drive in Bessemer, Ala.

North Korea is using forced labor from its network of prison camps to mine coal and other minerals to boost exports and earn foreign currency, using the cash to support its nuclear weapons programs, according to a South Korean human rights group.

A report by the Seoul-based Citizens' Alliance for North Korea Human Rights said an intricate network of government ministries and other entities relies on prison labor and other illicit operations to bring in money to the isolated Asian country.

2020 was a bad year for butterflies, too.

The population of monarch butterflies that migrated to Mexico to ride out the cold winter months in the north fell 26% from a year earlier, according to a new report from the Mexican government and the Word Wildlife Fund.

The Federal Aviation Administration must address "weaknesses" in its oversight of Boeing that led the agency to miss flaws that contributed to two deadly crashes involving the Boeing 737 Max aircraft, a federal watchdog has found.

An inspector general's report from the Department of Transportation said U.S. aviation regulators do not understand the plane's flight control software that caused two devastating crashes in 2018 and 2019.

Five out-of-state board members of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas — the entity that maintains and operates much of the state's electricity grid — will resign Wednesday, according to a notice filed with the Public Utility Commission of Texas.

Facebook will restore news pages in Australia after the government agreed to change a proposed law forcing tech companies to pay publishers for news content.

The new law would force Google and Facebook to pay Australian news publishers for stories with terms of a deal set by a third party, had they not been able to negotiate payout agreements with local publishers themselves.

Google agreed to follow the law after striking a deal with the nation's biggest publishers. Facebook protested and yanked news content from its site in Australia last Thursday.

The wife of one of the world's most notorious drug kingpins, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, was arrested Monday for allegedly helping her husband run his multi-billion dollar international drug cartel and for aiding in his 2015 escape from a Mexican prison.

United Airlines suspended the use of older model 777 jets after an engine failed shortly after takeoff in Colorado on Saturday, raining debris on suburban Broomfield, Colo.

The temporary suspension applies to 777 models that are powered by Pratt & Whitney 4000-112 engines, United announced on Twitter.

A dramatic arrest earlier this week of Spanish rapper Pablo Hasél, who was convicted of criticizing the monarchy and supporting a Basque separatist group in social media posts, has sparked days of protests across Spain and renewed debate over free speech in the country.

Thousands of Hasél supporters have taken to the streets in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Girona, since his arrest. But peaceful protests devolved into chaos as protesters clashed with police for a third night in a row Thursday. Dozens have been arrested across the country since the demonstrations began.

Texas officials are cracking down on businesses they say have hiked the prices of food, water, and hotel rooms while the state continues to deal with shortages caused by unprecedented winter weather.

Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee, the chief civil attorney for Texas' largest county, and Linda Hidalgo, the Harris County Judge, said Houston area residents have complained of hotel rooms and bottled water being sold at exorbitant prices.

Updated at 9:07 a.m. ET

New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Amazon on Tuesday, claiming the massive e-commerce company's "flagrant disregard for health and safety requirements" during the coronavirus pandemic put the lives of workers and the general public at risk.

Updated at 12:45 p.m. ET

A winter storm that brought bitter cold, snow and ice and left millions without power in Texas and northern Mexico will extend its grip through Tuesday.

The National Weather Service reports extremely cold temperatures ranging from minus 5 to 3 degrees are predicted through at least noon on Tuesday for all of North and Central Texas.

For the first time since November, average new daily coronavirus infections in the U.S. fell under 100,000 — well below the average infection rate in December and January, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The seven- day average of new infections dropped below 100,000 on Friday, continuing at that level through Sunday, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Researchers reported 83,321 new infections and 3,361 new deaths Sunday.

The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the planned execution of an Alabama death row inmate late Thursday night, after justices upheld a lower court's ruling requiring Willie B. Smith III's personal pastor to be in the chamber with him when he was given the lethal injection.

The decision came down the same night Smith was originally scheduled to be put to death inside of the William C. Holman Correctional Facility.

Officials in Australia's state of Victoria mandated a five-day stay-at-home order to prevent the spread of the area's growing number of coronavirus infections.

But the tennis must go on.

Tennis Australia, the organizers of the Australian Open, had allowed 30,000 fans to attend matches thus far. But under the new restrictions, the stands will sit empty.

A second person who had contracted the Ebola virus died this week in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marking another outbreak just three months after the nation outlasted the virus's second-worst outbreak in history.

The latest victim was from the North Kivu province, the World Health Organization and the DRC's health ministry said in a statement Thursday.

Michigan's highest ranking Republican leader was caught on video calling the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol a "hoax" and espousing other conspiracy theories related to the siege.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, in a video posted on YouTube of a meeting with Hillsdale County Republican Party officials, said of the Capitol insurrection in which five people died: "It was all staged."

Quaker Oats cooked up a new image for an old, offensive brand Tuesday. PepsiCo Inc. the parent company for Quaker Oats, announced it's rebranding Aunt Jemima, the popular pancake and syrup brand, retiring the racist stereotype used for the product's image.

Fox News on Monday asked a judge to dismiss a $2.7 billon lawsuit against the network and some of its hosts filed by election technology company Smartmatic, claiming the suit is an attempt to "chill" First Amendment rights.

Updated at 10:30 a.m. ET

Mary Wilson, one of the co-founders of The Supremes, died Monday at the age of 76, her publicist announced.

Wilson "passed away suddenly" at her Henderson, Nev., home, the singer's longtime friend and publicist Jay Schwartz said in a statement. No cause of death was given.

Wilson was a "trendsetter who broke down social, racial and gender barriers," Schwartz said in his statement.