TACO BELL is shaking things up with a menu addition that’s a little outside of its usual Tex-Mex lineup.
Known for its tacos, burritos, and nacho fries, the iconic chain is now venturing into the chicken nugget game – but with a distinct twist.
Launched today (December 19), fast food fans will be able to tuck into nuggets with unique Taco Bell flair.
By its own admission, Taco Bell said in a press release that it’s entering a category “where chicken nugget loyalty runs deep.”
The space is most notably dominated by the likes of McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Chick-Fil-A.
Of course, no chicken nugget experience is complete without the right dipping sauces.
You’ll have a trio of sauces that have been carefully curated to complement your nuggets to choose from.
Options include jalapeño honey mustard, a spicy ranch developed in collaboration with Hidden Valley, and the all-new “Bell sauce,” an exclusive addition to the lineup.
So, what sets these nuggets apart?
Taco Bell’s chicken nuggets are marinated in a zesty jalapeño buttermilk seasoning, giving them a bold and spicy kick.
The breading is anything but ordinary, featuring a unique blend of breadcrumbs and crunchy tortilla chips.
This innovative coating promises to deliver satisfying crunch and a nod to Taco Bell’s signature flavors that we’ve come to love.
In a recent Facebook post, food blogger Markie_devo shared the launch with fans, announcing. “Launching today at Taco Bell, will you try these?”
Fans quickly took to the comments to share their thoughts.
One user said, “They should have brought back the chicken tacos instead.”
Another comment read, “I don’t see why Taco Bell is going this route. Like seriously, quit trying to be like McDonald’s and Burger King when your supposed to be a Mexican cuisine restaurant!”
A third person shared, “Yay, these look delicious!”
Looking for your next chicken nugget fix? Here's a list of all the places you can find chicken nugget meals right now:
The nuggets will be available in various meal options to suit all appetites.
A 5-piece order with one dipping sauce is priced at $3.99, while a 10-piece option comes in at $6.99.
For those with a hungrier appetite, Taco Bell offers combo meals that include one sauce, an order of nacho fries, and a drink.
A 5-piece combo costs $5.99, and the 10-piece combo will cost you $8.99.
But the ultimate indulgence is the full-value meal.
A full-value meal includes five chicken nuggets, one dipping sauce, a crunchy taco, a beef chalupa, nacho fries, and a drink for only $10.49.
NEW speed cameras are going up in a major city around a prominent school zone.
Specific streets in Baltimore, Maryland, will see new tech unveiled to enhance road safety and help to modify driver behaviour.
According to the Baltimore City Department of Transportation, the new cameras will be placed between the 3700-4800 blocks of Belair Road, near The Green School of Baltimore and the Belair-Edison School.
These cameras, which will operate year-round, Monday through Friday from 6am to 8pm, will automatically send out $40 fines to those caught breaking the speed limit, although no points will be added to their driver’s license.
These citations will be generated if a vehicle is caught going 12mph or more over the limit.
Known as Automated Traffic Violation Enforcement System, or ATVES, these cameras will be tested daily on their accuracy, while annual audits will also take place.
According to the Baltimore City website, failure to pay the $40 fine or requesting a violation review, as well as contesting a violation liability by the due date, will result in an automatic admission of liability.
This could even result in additional fees or penalties until all charges are paid in full.
According to the Baltimore Fishbowl, at least four pedestrians have died after being struck by cars along Belair Road in the past few weeks.
This includes one who was hit within the new speed enforcement location ahead of its implementation.
This comes as The Sun US reported a warning in October to heavy-footed drivers being threatened with $100 fines – after the number of speed cameras on a central highway doubled.
Drivers who routinely drive along Interstate 84 in New York will now need to be extremely cautious of stealth speed cameras being installed in the area.
These cameras, which comes equipped with radar technology, have been installed throughout New York State to clamp down on speeding drivers.
But, to protect work zones and construction crews, speed cameras are being installed along stretches of I-84 to ensure drivers obey the speed limits.
The stealth cameras are being positioned at work zones and areas where crews are fixing roads throughout New York, according to radio station 101.5 WPDH.
The New York Department of Transportation said the cameras are being installed to protect drivers and construction crews.
Staying with New York, almost 4,000 drivers were hit with parking tickets in the state after experimental AI cameras wrongly determined they had been blocking bus lanes.
Officials say the cameras were not properly programmed for the routes they were covering, leading to the embarrassing mix-up.
The artificial intelligence cameras were launched earlier this year on certain buses in New York City.
Plans are afoot to have these cameras on more than 1,020 buses by the end of the year.
A further 1,000 are expected to have the cameras installed next year.
The scheme is costing the city a staggering $83 million, with Hayden AI taking the contract.
THE US government backed a risky virus-hunting project led by the Wuhan lab at the centre of the Covid origins debate, The Sun can reveal.
The Global Virome Project – a pitch to collect every virus in the world led by Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Batwoman” and New York-based EcoHealth Alliance – had allies in the US government, new documents show.
EcoHealth Alliance, whose mission is to prevent pandemics, has been under fire since the early days of the pandemic over its bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab.
The group has faced scrutiny over whether Covid may have emerged from research at the lab that was funded by the US government.
One of their projects, the Global Virome Project, aimed to collect nearly every unknown virus in the world with the potential to infect humans – thought to be 500,000 or more.
Co-led by EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak and Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli, they planned to work with labs across the world on the ambitious 10-year project at a cost of $3billion.
China’s biggest genome sequencing company – which has ties to the Chinese military and is now blacklisted by the Pentagon – was set to be a collaborator.
And China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences was also on board.
Now, new documents – obtained by US Right to Know – show that the US government backed the controversial virus-hunting project.
Records show how the US State Department and USAID helped get it off the ground from 2016 to 2019.
They show that the US forged ahead despite unanswered questions around who would own the data – and whether the Chinese partners would be transparent.
The documents also show the government knew the project could be a national security risk.
A “draft pitch” seen by the State Department warned that a lack of “US leadership” meant the Chinese government “could take a leading position”.
The document is dated May 20, 2019 – just months before the first cases of Covid began circulating in Wuhan.
And it warned that “limited access to the information… may have serious national security implications”.
A comment on the draft pitch states that “an equivalent statement will be inserted into the Chinese doc”.
In other words, US institutions, such as EcoHealth Alliance, were told that China going ahead with the project could be a national security risk to America.
And at the same time, Chinese institutions were told that the US going ahead with the project would pose a security risk to China.
The name of the US government employee who read the pitch and made the comments has been redacted.
But it points to the close ties between the government and American scientists working in China on virus research.
USAID – which coordinates its budget with the State Department – funded with Global Virome Project with $1.3 million, according to a letter sent by Senator Roger Marshall.
The USAID also funded Daszak’s previous project – a $210million virus hunting programme called PREDICT.
Since the Covid pandemic, the project has come under fire due to the leading roles of Daszak and Shi – who worked on risky coronavirus engineering research in Wuhan.
The project aimed to gather intel on 99 per cent of the world’s mystery viral threats, EcoHealth Alliance said in 2017.
The Chinese government has shown a strong interest in the Global Virome Project and is not shy in funding projects where Chinese scientists will take a lead
State Department cable
By building a catalogue of viruses and experimenting with each one to work out whether they threaten humans, the aim was to prevent future pandemics.
But it’s this very research that many experts – and the FBI – fear may have sparked the Covid pandemic.
Experts claim the Wuhan lab endangered the world by carrying out so-called “gain of function” experiments to engineer chimeric viruses.
This “souping up” involves extracting viruses from animals to engineer in a lab to make them more transmissible and deadly to humans.
In 2018, funding for one of Daszak and Shi’s projects was refused by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) over safety concerns.
The proposal – called DEFUSE and leaked by a whistleblower in 2021 – shows they planned to engineer a virus that has a striking similarity to the genetic make-up of Covid.
Despite being refused funding by DARPA, questions have been raised over whether the research was funded by another source and led to the pandemic.
Unclassified State Department correspondence from the American Embassy in Beijing also endorsed the Global Virome Project in 2017.
The cable, signed by Terry Branstad – the US ambassador to China at the time – hails collaboration between the US and China in the search for the world’s deadliest viruses.
Shi – China’s “Batwoman” – is mentioned in the cable, along with other government scientists in China.
And it says Chinese government funding had already been given for the Chinese arm of the project, led by Shi.
The cable says: “The Chinese government has shown a strong interest in the Global Virome Project and is not shy in funding projects where Chinese scientists will take a lead.”
But the cable acknowledged that “like all risky endeavours, failure is a possibility”.
It said questions about ownership of genomic data and viral samples had not yet been answered.
The cable reads: “Who will own the samples that are collected by many countries? Where will they be analyzed? Will all GVP data be freely available to the public?”
Despite concerns, collaboration between US and Chinese institutions on cutting-edge virology in Wuhan moved forward.
Today, viral samples with potential clues about the pandemic remain unexplored and inaccessible.
When the pandemic hit, at least 11,051 samples were left in freezers at the Wuhan lab by US government-backed scientists, documents show.
These include 6,380 samples from bats, 3,000 human samples and 1,671 rodent samples.
And some of the samples are from Yunnan Province – the area in China where coronaviruses closely related to Covid can be found.
The samples remain inaccessible in Wuhan freezers, according to Daszak.
In March 2020, the State Department tried to obtain viral samples from the lab – but failed.
With funding secured for collaboration between the Wuhan lab and EcoHealth Alliance, questions remain over whether scientists moved forward with the plans to engineer coronaviruses with the features of Covid.
The 2017 unclassified cable also strikes an uncertain tone about the Chinese’s largest genomics sequencing company being a partner on the project.
Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) had offered to test 30 per cent of the virus samples – a significant stake.
But the cable said: “BGI’s commitment… to GVP’s values of open, free access to data has not been officially stated.”
It added that BGI “did not provide details on how that sequencing would take place or where the subsequent data would be housed”.
And it pointed out that “BGI has enjoyed significant funding from the Chinese government”.
A government official visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in October 2017 – one month after the cable – and was not allowed inside the laboratories.
Still, American and Chinese institutions continued to collaborate on virus hunting work.
In the seven years since the 2017 cable proposed collaboration, BGI’s ambitions have come into fuller view.
In 2021, BGI was blacklisted by the Pentagon as a Chinese military company.
A bombshell investigation claimed that it was collecting genetic data using a popular test taken by millions of pregnant women.
The State Department and USAID apparently backed the Global Virome Project to gain insight about the risk of disease spillover from animals to humans.
EcoHealth also pitched it as a way to help prevent biowarfare and lab accidents.
But after the outbreak of Covid, the US government was urged to axe funding for the Global Virome Project.
Ping Chen, who was the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases rep at the US Embassy in Beijing in 2020, said: “USAID funded Global Virome Project and worked very closely with WIV.
“Maybe they want to revisit their decision… not to continue the support to the virome project after Covid-19.”
The Sun and USRTK have contacted the State Department, USAID and Daszak for comment.
The US government has since suspended EcoHealth Alliance from receiving government funds.
The non-profit and Daszak are both under investigation over failures to properly oversee the research in Wuhan.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was also banned from receiving US government funding for 10 years in September last year for a failure to hand over lab notebooks and data.
Grants from US agencies, including National Institutes of Heath, made up most of EcoHealth Alliance’s budget – which was about $14million in 2022.
EcoHealth Alliance has denied any wrongdoing over its experiments – and categorically denied any link to the origins of Covid.
The funding suspension came after The Sun revealed that the US government has dished out some $60million of public money to the organisation since the start of the pandemic – despite questions still raging over its work at the Wuhan lab.
The State Department facilitates responsible international cooperation to address shared challenges, including to mitigate threats of infectious diseases
US State Department spokesperson
They had continued to collect and test hundreds of samples of bat coronaviruses since 2020 with US government funding.
The FBI and the US Department of Energy believe Covid most likely leaked from a lab in China.
Dozens of experts, including the World Health Organisation, have also suggested Covid could have escaped from the Wuhan lab – and linked the outbreak to projects by EcoHealth Alliance.
Nearly five years after the pandemic started, the world still has no definitive answers on where the virus came from.
The natural origins theory contends that Covid jumped from bats into humans through an “intermediate host”.
But an animal host has not been found after four years of searching.
China has refused to cooperate with a full-scale probe into the origins and experts claim a “cover up” is continuing today.
PRINCE Andrew’s Chinese “spy” pal threatens to bring down the royal family and is more damaging that his Epstein links, a biographer says.
A suspected Chinese spy who was Andrew’s “close confidant” was unmasked for the first time last week.
Yang Tengbo was even invited to Andrew’s birthday party in 2020 and supported him through his recent scandals.
Andrew won’t be joining the Royal Family at Sandringham for Christmas amid the fallout from the scandal.
The prince’s biographer Andrew Lownie told The Sun’s Royal Exclusive show: “It’s probably the most damaging of Andrew’s scandals.
“It’s more damaging than Epstein. I think the story is going to run right through next year.
“He’s always been much more vulnerable to the financial scandals in his life than the sexual ones.
“These stories haven’t really been investigated. It’s going to have to lead to greater transparency about royal finances.
“This has unlocked a whole series of events that I think are going to be very damaging to the monarchy.
“This is going to give fresh impetus to journalists to look into his financial affairs and how he affords to live in Royal Lodge.
“A lot more is still to come out. A lot has already come out in the past week about his activities.
“It’s the tip of the iceberg. He’s been scrounging money off people in the Middle East and Central Asia.
“When those stories come out, I think he’s going to be complete toast.
“The danger is that he’s going to bring the royal family down with him.”
The Sun exclusively revealed insiders had urged Andrew to “uninvite himself” from the royal family’s pre-festive lunch today.
He was due to attend the lunch at the palace but a source said: “He is under pressure to step away.”
It comes just days after the Duke of York said he won’t be joining the Royal Family at Sandringham for the usual celebrations on Christmas Day.
It is understood his ex-wife Sarah, Duchess of York, has also dropped out from the Norfolk festivities.
The pair are said to be staying at Royal Lodge, in Windsor, for the period instead.
Both Andrew and Fergie’s daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, had already chosen to spend Christmas with their respective in-laws.
It comes as a suspected Chinese spy who was friends with Andrew has been unmasked for the first time.
An insider said it’s hard to see the duke out in “public with the royals ever again”.
They said: “I find it hard to imagine he will ever join them again in public, if I’m honest.
“There’s only so many times the duke can be asked to keep his head down and wait for the storm to pass. Enough is enough.”
Yang Tengbo, 50 – who is understood to have been a “close confidante” of the Duke of York – can be named after a court anonymity ban was lifted this afternoon.
During a tribunal hearing, judges concluded Yang had not been honest about his links to the Chinese state and could exploit his relationship with the duke and other public figures.
The former chairman of Hampton Group had been in the country for two decades.
Photos show him posing alongside ex-Prime Ministers David Cameron and Theresa May, as well as the royal.
He was even invited to Andrew’s birthday party in 2020 and supported him through his recent scandals.
But the suspected spy subsequently lost an appeal against a decision to ban him from the UK on national security grounds.
He was stopped by counter-terrorism services in 2021 and ordered to surrender his devices.
Court documents said Yang had split his time between China and the UK and told officials he considered this country his second home.
In February last year, he was “off-boarded” from a flight from Beijing to London and told the home secretary was in the process of examining the case to exclude him from the UK.
That order was made the following month, with his appeal against the decision rejected last week by a special immigration appeals tribunal.
Judges concluded Yang had not been honest about his links to the Chinese state and could exploit his relationship with the duke and other public figures.
Guy Vassall-Adams KC, for Yang, told the High Court: “There has been an enormous amount of media reporting in relation to this story, and particularly in relation to the relationship between my client, H6, and Prince Andrew, as well as a huge amount of speculation about the identity of my client.”
Yang said he has “done nothing wrong or unlawful”, adding in a statement that the “widespread description of me as a ‘spy’ is entirely untrue”.
It comes after the Sun reported last week a foreign agent knew how to sneak people in and out of the duke’s Royal Lodge home.
The shock revelation emerged in a letter from one of the royal’s top advisers, Dominic Hampshire, to the spy.
Mr Hampshire continued to work for Andrew even after the note was found by MI5 on the spy’s phone in 2020.
It read: “I hope that it is clear to you where you sit with my principal (Andrew) and indeed his family.
“You should never underestimate the strength of that relationship.
“You sit at the very top of a tree many people would like to be on.”
It added: “Under your guidance, we found a way to get the relevant people unnoticed in and out of the house in Windsor.”
Mr Hampshire also confirmed the man could act for Andrew in talks with Chinese investors.
The note was sent 10 months after the duke withdrew from public life after paying damages to Virginia Roberts-Giuffre, a victim of his US paedo pal Jeffrey Epstein.
A source told The Sun: “Dom was still working for the duke until at least April this year.
“It’s hard to believe, given that Andrew must have known for years that his Chinese links had become a matter of national security.”
A statement from the duke’s office on Friday said “nothing of a sensitive nature [was] ever discussed”.
The statement added: “The Duke of York followed advice from HMG and ceased all contact with the individual after concerns were raised.
“The duke met the individual through official channels, with nothing of a sensitive nature ever discussed.
“He is unable to comment further on matters relating to national security.”
Writing for the Sun, royal expert Phil Dampier said: “By allowing a Chinese spy inside royal residences like Windsor and Buckingham Palace he endangered the security of the whole Royal Family and the institution of the monarchy.”
MICHAEL Vick is being chased down by debt creditors attempting to force him into bankruptcy.
Just days after signing a deal to become the next head coach of Norfolk State football, Vick now has creditors breathing down his neck.
Court documents show three creditors, Gerald Lee Craig, Eduardo D Arkos, and Kathleen Safreed, filed involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy petitions against Vick and his wife Kijafa, according to TMZ Sports.
The collectors are attempting to obtain a large sum of money from Vick, but his attorney is calling the move “frivolous.”
The creditors claim they have a $509,652 judgement against Vick and his wife for a loan in 2018 that was never paid off.
They want to place Vick into bankruptcy in the hopes of retrieving that money from him.
Vick’s attorney, Arthur J. Jones, slammed these proceedings in a statement.
“This frivolous attempt at forcing Michael Vick into involuntary bankruptcy is a continuation of the shenanigans which began with the secondary securities market purporting to sell a usurious debt without Mr. Vick’s knowledge,” he said.
“It is especially spurious for the petitioners to take this action after Mr. Vick has tried to work with them to satisfy the debt in an appropriate amount.
“We fully expect that they will be sanctioned by the federal court if they continue down this road.
“Legalities aside, it is also foolish to seek media attention aimed at wrongfully harming Mr. Vick’s name and reputation when the idea should be to resolve matters instead of create new ones or waste time.
“This law office will take all actions permissible under the law to address any and all harm caused by the petitioners with this bankruptcy filing.”
Vick has dealt with financial problems before, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2008.
He was also sued by a separate group of creditors in 2022 that alleged he owed $1.2 million in unpaid loans.
Vick has spent his time recently as a face on Fox NFL Countdown every Sunday morning.
He is transitioning out of that role to serve as the head coach at Norfolk State University.
Vick accepted the job after deep negotiations with Sacramento State.
First-round games:
Second-round games:
Semifinals:
National Championship Game:
“It’s an honor to announce that I’ll be the new head coach of Norfolk State University,” he said in a post.
“Looking forward to coming back home.”
The Norfolk State campus is near Vick’s hometown of Newport News, Virginia.
Vick has experience on college football‘s biggest stage, going to the National Championship with Virginia Tech in 1999.
He lost that game, but was drafted as the No. 1 pick in 200.
IN choosing to waive her anonymity, Gisèle Pelicot has paid a huge price.
But the gift she has made to women, especially those who have also been raped and sexually assaulted, is greater still.
It was feminists that pushed for the change in UK law, which came into force in 1976, that gave victims of sex crime the right to anonymity.
Prior to that, women were very unlikely to report rape, because the humiliation of being named brought shame and stigma onto the victim, rather than the perpetrator.
In cases of sexual assault, all too often the scrutiny is on the woman, rather than the man that carried out the attack.
“What was she wearing?”, “Had she been drinking?”, “Was she known to be promiscuous?”
All these questions and assumptions put the focus on the victim. Gisèle’s willingness to be named and photographed by the world’s press, having been raped by upwards of 50 men, has taken ‘courage’ to a new level.
The late Jill Saward, known as the Ealing Vicarage rape victim, waived her anonymity after being repeatedly and violently raped by two men during a burglary.
Jill was only 21 at the time, but she went on to be a lifelong campaigner for the rights and protection of rape victims. Like Gisèle, she was a hero.
Now that the 51 men in the Pelicot trial have been convicted and sentenced, other rape victims, inspired by Gisèle, are saying they will also waive anonymity during any trial. I hope they do so with support, and without regret.
Some years ago, I interviewed an 18-year-old who had been gang raped and was determined that I should use her full name in the report in a national newspaper.
I gently dissuaded her from doing so, because she had her life and career ahead of her.
I asked if she wanted her terrible ordeal to be the first thing a potential employer would see when googling her and she later told me she was grateful for my advice.
Gisèle has been a gamechanger. She has brought the truth about rape, and how ‘ordinary men’ who are part of the local community can and do carry out monstrous crimes.
She has shone a light on the perpetrators, and become an international feminist icon.
Gisèle will be forever remembered as a woman who shifted the focus onto the men who commit such heinous crimes. As a result, no stigma or shame has attached to her. Far from it.
I have campaigned my entire adult life to end male violence against women and girls, and fully support the right to anonymity for rape victims.
BY Ellie Doughty, Foreign News Reporter
A total of 51 convictions were delivered in sentencing for the horrific Pelicot mass rape trial on December 19, in Avignon, France.
They included:
Dominique Pelicot – 20 years
Romain Vandevelde – 15 years
Charly Arbo, Jerome Vilela, Dominique Davies – 13 years
Jean-Pierre Marechal, Thierry Parisis, Cedric Grassot, Hassan Ouamou – 12 years
Fabien Sotton – 11 years
Joan Kawai, Nizar Hamida, Karim Sebaoui, Vincent Coullet, Jean-Luc LA- 10 years
Christian Lescole, Husamettin Dogan, Simone Mekenese, Cendric Venzin, Cyril Delville, Redouane Azougagh – 9 years
Lionel Rodriguez, Cyrille Delville, Boris Moulin, Nicolas Francois, Thierry Parisis, Redouane Azougagh, Jean Tirano, Mohamed Rafaa, Mahdi D, Ahmed Tbarik, Patrice Nicolle, Gregory Serviol, Abdelali Dallal, Paul Grovogui, Omar Douiri – 8 years
Ludovick Blemeur, Quentin Hennebert, Mathieu Dartus, Florian Rocca – 7 years
Andy Rodriguez, Adrien Longeron, Jean-Marc LeLoup, Patrick Aron, Cyprien Aron – 6 years
Jacques Cubeau, Philippe Leleu, Hughes Malago, Didier Sambuchi – 5 years
Joseph Cocco, Saifeddine Ghabi – 3 years
I also wholeheartedly applaud every woman who stands up and uses her name without shame. Such women must have full protection and support from the criminal justice system, and from wider society.
As Gisele said, shame must change sides.
The bravery and tenacity of women who have endured terrible abuse never fails to bring me joy and sustenance.
I am one of countless women saying to Gisèle: “Thank you, sister”.
Women's Aid has this advice for victims and their families:
If you are a victim of domestic abuse, SupportLine is open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 6pm to 8pm on 01708 765200. The charity’s email support service is open weekdays and weekends during the crisis – messageinfo@supportline.org.uk.
Women’s Aid provides a live chat service – available weekdays from 8am-6pm and weekends 10am-6pm.
You can also call the freephone 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247.