The FDA on Friday authorized emergency use of the first over-the-counter test that can detect both Covid-19 and flu.

The single-use test, made by Lucira Health, is able to differentiate between influenza A and B as well as Covid. It takes about 30 minutes to get results from a self-collected nasal swab.

“Today’s authorization of the first OTC test that can detect Influenza A and B, along with SARS-CoV-2, is a major milestone in bringing greater consumer access to diagnostic tests that can be performed entirely at home,” top FDA medical device regulator Jeff Shuren said in a statement. The FDA noted that all rapid diagnostic tests have a risk of false positive and false negative results.

“This is a major milestone for Lucira Health and at-home diagnostics, and I can’t thank our employees and partners enough for seeing this through, and of course, for the FDA’s recognition,” said Erik Engelson, president and CEO of Lucira.

MIAMI (AP) — Florida Democrats on Saturday are set to choose a new party leader after a disastrous midterm performance in the onetime presidential battleground state, with particularly abysmal results among Latinos.

The strongest contenders are former state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and former state senator Annette Taddeo, both of whom lost their own races last year. Fried lost the Democratic gubernatorial nomination to Charlie Crist, while Taddeo failed to unseat Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar.

Party members will select the new chair at a special meeting in Maitland, an Orlando suburb. They are picking a replacement for Manny Diaz, who resigned last month. In his resignation letter, he listed a number of problems facing the party, including a lack of resources and volunteers and poor messaging.

Within the last couple of years, Republicans have erased the voter registration advantage in Florida that Democrats had for decades. In the November midterm, longtime blue counties such as Miami-Dade and Palm Beach flipped red, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won a landslide reelection victory as he eyes a 2024 presidential bid.

CHICAGO (AP) — For years, Republicans have sought to win over voters by depicting Democratic-led cities as lawless centers of violence that need tough-on-crime policies. In Chicago, some of the Democrats running for mayor are deploying the same strategy as they debate how to make the city safer.

One leading candidate, who touts his endorsement from the Chicago police union, says “crime is out of control” and the city needs hundreds more officers patrolling its streets. Another hopeful says that if suspects flee a crime scene, officers should be able to “hunt them down like a rabbit.”

Even incumbent Lori Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first openly gay person to serve as Chicago mayor, has used language right out of the GOP playbook, accusing a top rival in her reelection bid of wanting to defund the police.

The shift in rhetoric reflects the degree to which concerns about crime have dominated Tuesday’s mayoral election in Chicago and threatened Lightfoot’s reelection bid. Far from being an outlier, the nation’s third-largest city is just the latest Democratic stronghold where public safety has become a top election issue.

A Mexican restaurant is taking over a high-profile location in the town of Rifle, Colorado, where U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Shooters Grill previously resided.

The restaurant, called Tapatios, recently applied for a hotel and liquor license at 120 E. 3rd St., Unit C,, according to the Rifle City Council agenda. The Glenwood Springs Post Independent reports the council unanimously approved the application at a meeting on Feb. 15.

Tapatios runs another restaurant in nearby New Castle,, where the menu features tacos, tortas, enchiladas, burritos and other fare.

Rep. Boebert was forced to close Shooters, a gun-themed eatery where the wait staff was encouraged to open carry, last summer after the building changed ownership. Milken Enterprises, a corporation headed by Mike Miller and Dan Meskin, took over legal ownership of the building in May 2022, property records show, and declined to renew the business’ lease.

On a recent episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” a prime-time show on Fox News, Tucker Carlson introduced his first guest, Mark McCloskey, at the end of a long segment on how “self-defense is becoming illegal” in America. McCloskey and his wife, Patricia, were the St. Louis couple made briefly and ignominiously famous for brandishing weapons at Black Lives Matter protesters outside their Midwestern palazzo. “So they’re racist,” Carlson said, with a squeaky, cartoonish emphasis.

“There’s that stupid voice,” Kat Abughazaleh, a twenty-three-year-old senior video producer for the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, said. She and I were watching Carlson’s show in side-by-side cubicles at her organization’s offices, in Washington, D.C. Abughazaleh, a pair of sunglasses perched on her head and a vape pen always within reach, was flagging moments from the episode to post online. One clip, of Carlson declaring that “the F.B.I., as an organization, has joined in the hunt for Christians,” went immediately to Twitter. “I was so excited to hear that hilarious Christian line—it was so good,” she told me during a commercial break. Another clip, an interview with the “pro-life Spider-Man”—a baby-faced young man who climbs buildings without ropes to protest abortion—was saved for an end-of-week roundup. (“Abortion is just like climbing a skyscraper,” the pro-life Spider-Man had said. “It’s a matter of life or death.”) Abughazaleh films her roundups on Fridays and posts them to TikTok, where she’s building a following. Her most popular video, which includes a clip of a Fox News host comparing Washington, D.C., to Somalia, has just under a million views.

“I watch Tucker Carlson so you don’t have to,” the bio spaces of her social-media accounts read. Abughazaleh has been professionally watching Carlson, who has around three million viewers a night, for nearly two years. “You don’t know Fox News until you are watching it for a job,” she said. “You see all these patterns emerge.” The Fox universe is a place with a different “news” sense than most of the country, she said—narratives about I.R.S. armies, food shortages, race wars, and predatory trans activists—but its niche story lines are likely predictive of what we’ll be talking about over the next two long campaign years. Though, in Abughazaleh’s view, Carlson has floundered a bit since the midterms. “I think he’s still kind of lost right now,” she said. “He’s not really sure what direction to take it.”

Others members of the Media Matters team who watch Fox’s prime-time lineup seemed to agree. “He’s pro-smoking all of a sudden,” Andrew Lawrence, the deputy director of rapid response, said. Even serious topics often come with a gimmick attached. A recent theme on Carlson’s show is food shortages supposedly caused by the war in Ukraine; Tiara Soleim, a.k.a. the Chicken Lady, a throaty-voiced blonde who was once a contestant on “The Bachelor,” has come on to talk about it. On a recent show, Carlson spent a segment dissecting a kiss hello between Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff at the State of the Union; the accompanying graphic read “Wife Swap.” Carlson’s show, aside from the opening monologue, is manically paced, and guests often have trouble getting a word in edgewise. This, paired with Carlson’s elastic face and goofy voices, can lend the hour a carnival feel. But the show’s rhetoric is muscular and alarmist. On the episode I watched with Abughazaleh, the conservative media pundit Matt Walsh was a guest, talking about his anti-trans testimony before the Tennessee state legislature. “He’s in favor of cutting the breasts off girls?” Carlson said, of one legislator. “I mean, how could anybody get to a place where that’s O.K.?”

Neo-Nazi groups across the United States are planning a national "Day of Hate" against Jewish communities on Saturday, according to antisemitism watchdogs and police documents.

A leaked internal memo by the New York City Police Department's Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau, online organizers are "instructing likeminded individuals to drop banners, place stickers and flyers, or scrawl graffiti as a form of biased so-called action."

Jewish groups and police urged Jews to remain vigilant during the Sabbath. There will be additional patrols around synagogues in New York and New Jersey.

Researchers at the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), an international policy organization, said on Thursday that extremist groups had been promoting the day of action through Telegram posts, and identified the National Socialist Movement as one of the organizers.

https://www.newsweek.com/neo-nazi-groups-national-day-hate-new-york-chicago-los-angeles-1783608

NEW YORK — George Santos lied to a Seattle judge about working for Goldman Sachs while speaking at a 2017 bail hearing for a “family friend” who later pleaded guilty to fraud in an ATM skimming scheme, according to an audio recording of the proceeding and court records.

“So what do you do for work?” King County Superior Court Judge Sean O’Donnell asked Santos at the May 15, 2017 arraignment of defendant Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha.

“I am an aspiring politician and I work for Goldman Sachs,” Santos replied.

A winter heatwave, record low levels of rain and a startling lack of snow in Europe are pushing rivers, canals and lakes across the continent to alarmingly low levels, with experts warning there could be repeat of last year’s severe droughts.

Images of dried-up river beds and shrunken lakes are usually associated with the scorching heat of summer – not the winter. But an exceptionally warm and dry start to the year is affecting a swath of Europe, including central and southwest France, northern Spain and northern Italy.

There are concerns for what this might mean for water supplies.

Europe’s water situation has become “very precarious,” according to a study published in January by researchers at the Graz University of Technology in Austria, which used satellite data to analyze the world’s groundwater resources.

A new bill introduced in the Iowa Senate to ban anyone under the age of 18 from attending a drag show may also inadvertently ban kids from seeing some plays and musicals, pro wrestling events, the circus, or other live activities involving costumes and makeup.

Introduced by Sen. Sandy Salmon (R-Janesville), SF 348 bars youth from attending drag shows, and its definition of drag performer and drag show is broad enough that it could also apply to other forms of entertainment.

According to the bill, a “performer who exhibits a gender identity that is different than the performers’ gender assigned at birth through the use of clothing, makeup, accessories, or other gender signifiers” would not be allowed to perform in front of minors if the performance includes the “performer singing, lip-syncing, dancing, reading, or otherwise performing before an audience for entertainment whether or not performed for payment.”

By that definition, anyone under 18 would not be allowed to see “Mrs. Doubtfire” the musical. Based on Robin Williams’ movie of the same name, “Mrs. Doubtfire” is a comedy about an out-of-work actor who pretends to be a Scottish nanny so that he can stay active in his kids’ lives.

Back in my day, there were only four layers of Earth: the crust, mantle, liquid outer core and solid inner core. Now, scientists have revealed a new, distinct layer within our planet’s inner core, which could help inform the evolution of Earth’s magnetic field.
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In a new study released this week, a pair of seismologists at the Australian National University documented new evidence of a 400-mile thick solid metallic ball at the center of Earth’s inner core — like the smallest figurine of a massive, planetary Russian nesting doll set. The new layer consists of an iron-nickel alloy, like other parts of the core. But it has a different crystal structure that causes shock waves from earthquakes to reverberate through the layer at different speeds than the surrounding core, the study found.

“Clearly, the innermost inner core has something different from the outer layer,” said Thanh-Son Pham, lead author of the study. “We think that the way the atoms are [packed] in these two regions are a slightly different.”

Researchers study the inner core to better understand Earth’s magnetic field, which protects us from harmful radiation in space and helps make life possible on our home planet. Geophysicists surmise the inner core could have formed less than a billion years ago, which is relatively young on a geologic time scale. The study authors explain the inner core grows outward by solidifying materials from the liquid outer core, releasing heat and creating convection currents. This convection generates Earth’s magnetic field.