National News

Amazon said Wednesday the Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend was its biggest ever, aided by a record number of shoppers looking for deals amid high inflation. The company does not typically share how much it earns during its sales events and did not disclose its overall revenue from the weekend. It said independent businesses that sell on its site generated more than $1 billion in sales. The National Retail Federation says a record 196 million people shopped in stores and online during the five-day shopping period that stretched from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday. It says consumers also spent an average of $325 during the weekend on holiday-related purchases, up from $301 last year.

Matthew McConaughey, Mila Kunis, Jennifer Hudson and “Abbott Elementary” creator and star Quinta Brunson have been named People magazine’s 2022 “People of the Year.” The magazine unveiled its annual list Wednesday with Editor in Chief Wendy Naugle explaining this year’s honorees were selected because of their efforts to help others. McConaughey was chosen for his advocacy efforts after the Uvalde school shooting rocked his hometown. Kunis was lauded for her fundraising for Ukraine, where she was born. Hudson and Brunson was honored for her inclusive daytime talk show, while Brunson was selected for her work on “Abbott Elementary."

Hundreds of people have gathered at Harvard University and near Chinese consulates in New York and Chicago to support protesters who have called for that country’s leader to step down amid severe anti-virus restrictions in the biggest demonstrations against the government in Beijing in decades. About 50 protesters, mostly students at the elite Ivy League school, sang songs Tuesday in both Chinese and English. Several hundred gathered near consulates in New York and Chicago. Some held pieces of blank paper in front of their faces as a symbol of defiance to Chinese government censorship.

NASA is canceling a planned satellite that was going to intensely monitor greenhouse gases over the Americas because it got too costly and complicated. But the space agency says it will still be watching human-caused carbon pollution but in different ways. Tuesday's NASA announcement says that its GeoCarb mission, which was designed to monitor carbon dioxide, methane and how plant life changes over North and South America is now looking to cost more than $600 million. It was budgeted at $166 million.

Twitter is no longer enforcing its policy against misinformation about COVID-19. The change was announced in an online update to Twitter's rules and comes after the platform was purchased by Elon Musk, who in the past has himself spread misleading COVID claims on Twitter. The platform enacted its COVID misinformation policy in early 2020 and since then has suspended more than 11,000 accounts and removed nearly 100,000 pieces of content that it deemed potentially harmful. Some users celebrated the change Tuesday while public health experts warned it could discourage vaccination and other efforts to combat the still-spreading virus.

Waves of orange, glowing lava and ash blasted and billowed from the world’s largest active volcano and people on Hawaii’s Big Island have been warned to be ready if their communities are threatened. The ongoing eruption of Mauna Loa wasn’t immediately endangering nearby towns on Monday. But officials told residents to be ready in the event of a worst-case scenario. The U.S. Geological Survey says the eruption began late Sunday night in the volcano on the Big Island. Scientists had been on alert because of a recent spike in earthquakes at the summit of the volcano, which last erupted in 1984.

Lava is shooting into the air and flowing downhill as Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano erupts for the first time in nearly 40 years. For now, lava is not threatening any homes or communities and no evacuation orders have been issued. Lava could eventually reach neighborhoods on the eastern side of the Big Island though it could take a week or more for molten rock to reach populated areas. Mauna Loa is spewing sulfur dioxide and other volcanic gases which combine with other particles to form volcanic smog, or vog. State health officials are urging people to cut back on outdoor exercise and other activities that cause heavy breathing.