- Legendary Mexican singer and composer Armando Manzanero has died at the age of 85.
- Edward Snowden, the former national security contractor who fled to Russia after leaking classified documents from the U.S. government, has welcomed his first child, he and his wife announced on social media over the weekend.
- A former lawyer-turned-citizen journalist who covered the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, was sentenced Monday to four years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
- The White House coronavirus testing czar said Sunday that the new coronavirus strain making the disease more transmissible is no match for the vaccines that are already being rolled out.
- Carlos Ghosn, the head of Renault-Nissan who fled Japan in 2019, is expected to be questioned in January.
- It's the first time the U.K. variant has been identified in North America.
- Preliminary analysis in suggests that the new variant may be up to 70% more transmissible than previously circulating variants, according to the CDC.
- Getting the vaccine was “the best present I could have received in 2020," said health worker Maria Irene Ramirez, the first in Mexico to receive Pfizer's COVID-19 shot.
- French president Emmanuel Macron was no longer exhibiting coronavirus symptoms on Thursday and is expected to step out of quarantine.
- Amid significant ethnic tensions, despite Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s calls for unity, Wednesday’s reported attack occurred the day after the politician visited the region to discuss bringing perpetrators of recent attacks to justice.
- The number of journalists killed due to their work doubled globally in 2020, with at least four reporters murdered for their reporting in violence-marred Mexico, according to a watchdog.