Mercy and CoxHealth, the two major health care systems serving the Springfield metropolitan region, are responding to a significant spike in COVID-19 hospitalizations.

On Friday, CoxHealth said on Facebook it “may soon begin diverting some COVID-19 patients to other facilities throughout the state” due to the significant surge in patients. CoxHealth reports having 79 inpatients with COVID-19, a jump it describes as a "more than five-fold increase” from less than a month ago.

The Justice Department has released a trove of videos, including police body-worn camera footage, allegedly showing assaults against police officers defending the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The videos, made available after NPR and other media organizations filed a legal motion for their release, are further evidence of the violent nature of the Capitol riot and are cited as evidence in the assault cases against Thomas Webster and Scott Fairlamb.

Stock markets: Open. Post office? Open.

Federal courts? Schools? Banks? Businesses? It depends.

Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the end of slavery by marking the day enslaved people in Texas learned they were free, is now a federal holiday. The move comes after growing support nationwide for observing the day of celebration and reflection.

But actual practices for marking the holiday still vary widely.

Catherine Serou, a U.S. citizen studying in Russia, has been missing since she got into a car with a stranger on Tuesday. The authorities in Nizhny Novgorod, 250 miles east of Moscow, have started a criminal investigation and are searching a forested area outside the city where Serou's cell phone was last picked up.

On the day of her disappearance Serou managed to send a text message to her mother in Vicksburg, Miss. — the last sign of life from the 34-year-old graduate student and former Marine.

Americans are now able to visit the European Union again, vaccinated or not.

Six years ago, Saudi Arabian authorities arrested Mustafa Hashem al-Darwish and charged him with attending anti-government protests years earlier, when he was 17. According to Reprieve, a U.K. nonprofit that investigates human rights abuses, a court found al-Darwish guilty and sentenced him to death, despite the fact that he was a minor at the time he allegedly attended the protests.

After a contentious debate, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has voted to move forward with a process that could call into question the eligibility of politicians like President Joe Biden to receive Communion.

The bishops voted 168-55 in favor of drafting "a formal statement on the meaning of the Eucharist in the life of the Church," officials announced on Friday afternoon, the final day of their three-day virtual meeting. Six bishops abstained.