Khalid to host El Paso benefit concert following mass shooting

A funeral home in El Paso, Texas suffers the emotional and physical toll of the surge of ceremonies caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

AFPTV spends the day in a Covid-19 ward at a hospital in Houston, Texas, to see first hand the impact of the virus on patients and medical staff. Dr Joseph Varon has worked 264 days straight as he battles the disease that has killed more than 278,000 people in the US. "The coronavirus doesn’t just kill a person, it tears families apart," says Varon, who made headlines when a photo of him hugging an elderly Covid patient on Thanksgiving went viral.

On the terrace of a seafood restaurant in Houston, Texas's largest city, a few ladies are enjoying a local oyster dish. Sitting in the shade of a palm tree on a warm winter's day, the diners have no idea that behind the restaurant a young woman is busy giving the shells a second life. Thanks to Shannon Batte, they will soon form part of a reef in Galveston Bay, six miles away. New oysters will settle and develop on these shells, which will also provide perfect shelters for crabs, shrimp and small fish that will feed larger ones and contribute to the diversity of the environment.

A blanket of snow covers the streets of Houston, Texas, a southern US state more accustomed to record-breaking heat than ice. An historic cold snap has been sweeping the country for several days as a result of an Arctic blast that is causing temperatures to plummet.

Winter weather in Texas has left millions of people without heat and electricity. But volunteers braved the big freeze to rescue "cold-stunned" sea turtles.

Texas has announced a sweeping rollback of coronavirus restrictions, lifting a mask mandate and allowing most businesses to open at full capacity from next week.

People take to the streets in Columbus, Ohio to protest the fatal police shooting of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant. Body camera footage released by police showed officers arriving at the scene during a scuffle, with a small crowd of onlookers. One teenage girl is seen lunging at another with what appears to be a knife, when shots are heard and the girl collapses on the ground.

Texas may be known as the land of oil, but it is also at the forefront of the charge toward renewable energy in the US. The cold wave that hit the South in February once again put climate change in the spotlight and highlighted the reliance of the state’s electrical grid on wind turbines. A quarter of electricity here comes from wind, more than coal, the production of which fell by half in a decade. But in this deeply Republican state, the push for renewable energy has more to do with cash than climate.

Authorities said the van was carrying as many as 30 people, mainly migrant workers, at the time when it crashed on a highway in southern Texas after the driver lost control of the vehicle.

A US court has paved the way for the prohibition of one of the safest abortion procedures in Texas. A previous legal decision had called it unconstitutional.

The Texas law makes the state's abortion rules the strictest in the US. Abortion campaigners failed in a court challenge to block the law. Texas dodged existing US abortion laws by using an unusual enforcement system.

The US Justice Department has filed suit against Texas to prevent a state law banning abortions from being enforced.