Arguments over mask requirements and other restrictions have turned ugly in recent days as the deadly coronavirus surge across the U.S. engulfs small and medium-size cities that once seemed safely removed from the outbreak.

Hospitals across the South grappled with water shortages Sunday as the region carried on with recovery efforts in the wake of a devastating winter storm, and the weather offered a balmy respite — temperatures as high as the mid-60s.

The surging coronavirus is taking an increasingly dire toll across the U.S. just as a vaccine appears at hand, with the country now averaging over 1,300 COVID-19 deaths per day — the highest since the calamitous spring in and around New York City.

When Brittany Palomo was hired as a nurse in March, her parents tried to talk her out of it, fearful of the fast-spreading coronavirus. All the more reason, she told them, to start the career that had been her long-held dream. The pandemic, though, is a nightmare — one that has now claimed 300,000 lives in the U.S. and counting. “Wake up, my little girl, wake up!” Palomo's mother, Maria Palomo Salinas, screamed, her grief echoing through a Harlingen, Texas, hospital, when her daughter died of COVID-19 complications around 2 a.m. on a Saturday in late November. Palomo was 27 and, as a health care worker, was probably weeks away from getting the new vaccine that could have protected her from the virus. Instead, she became yet another victim of the relentless outbreak whose U.S. toll is accelerating as it eclipses another round-number mark.

The Pentagon is proposing to end an arrangement in which a single military officer leads two of the nation's main cybersecurity organizations, a move that a leading Democrat said Saturday makes him "profoundly concerned" amid a large-scale hacking campaign on U.S. government computer systems. Rep. Adam Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a letter to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller that he objects to the way the Pentagon is going about splitting off U.S. Cyber Command from the National Security Agency.

A record 621 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco so far this year, a staggering number that far outpaces the 173 deaths from COVID-19 the city has seen thus far. The crisis fueled by the powerful painkiller fentanyl could have been far worse if it wasn't for the nearly 3,000 times Narcan was used from January to the beginning of November to save someone from the brink of death, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday.

After a year that has darkened doorways across the U.S., the pandemic surpassed a milestone Monday that once seemed unimaginable, a stark confirmation of the virus's reach into all corners of the country and communities of every size and makeup.

The Nativity stable at Canton Lutheran Church will be silent this year, breaking from a community tradition of gathering for a live Christmas performance. Instead, churches in this rural corner of South Dakota are grappling with how to approach an Advent filled with quiet mourning after the coronavirus tore through the region.

Shaken by the gunfire erupting around her town in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, the woman decided to get out. She joined a long line at the local government office for the paperwork needed to travel. But when she reached the official, he told her she had wasted her time. In an interview with The Associated Press, the woman offered rare details of anger, desperation and growing hunger as both sides reject international calls for dialogue, or even a humanitarian corridor for aid, in their third week of deadly fighting.