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WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. on Friday opened COVID-19 booster shots to all adults and took the extra step of urging people 50 and older to seek one, aiming to ward off a winter surge as coronavirus cases rise even before millions of Americans travel for the holidays.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A fractious House handed President Joe Biden a marquee victory Friday by approving a roughly $2 trillion social and environment bill, as Democrats cast aside disputes that for months had stalled the measure and hampered efforts to sell their priorities to voters.

In June, three Florida prison guards who boasted of being white supremacists beat, pepper sprayed and used a stun gun on an inmate who screamed “I can’t breathe!” at a prison near the Alabama border, according to a fellow inmate who reported it to the state.

BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) — The defense attorney who caused an outcry by saying Black pastors should be barred from the murder trial over Ahmaud Arbery's death declared in court Friday that a courthouse rally and other actions supporting the slain Black man's family were comparable to a “public lynching” of the three white defendants.

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Fallen Silicon Valley star Elizabeth Holmes, accused of bamboozling investors and patients about her startup Theranos and its medical device that she said would reshape health care, took the witness stand late Friday in her trial for criminal fraud.

Struggling to stay upright as suffocating heat and humidity drained her energy in the U.S. Open semifinals, Peng Shuai refused to give up.

She paused between points to clutch at her left thigh and put her weight on her racket as if it were a cane.

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — The U.S. Senate has unanimously approved the nomination of Charles “Chuck” Sams III as National Park Service director, which will make him the first Native American to lead the agency.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Friday pardoned two Thanksgiving turkeys, saying that the white male birds were selected based on their “temperament, appearance and, I suspect, vaccination status.”

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lightning-sparked wildfires killed thousands of giant sequoias this year, leading to a staggering two-year death toll that accounts for up to nearly a fifth of Earth's largest trees, officials said Friday.