Novak Djokovic’s fate now lies in the hands of three Australian Federal Court justices, after his last-gasp appeal against deportation adjourned Sunday pending a verdict that is expected later in the day.

The tennis star’s lawyers told an emergency hearing that the government’s effort to deport him on the eve of the Australian Open was “irrational” and “unreasonable”, but they faced pointed questions from the panel of justices who will now decide his case.

Novak Djokovic’s lawyers painted Australia’s effort to deport him as “irrational” and “unreasonable” Sunday, in an eleventh-hour bid to reinstate the tennis star’s visa and allow him to remain in the country to defend his Australian Open crown.

With just hours to go before the first ball is served at Melbourne Park, Djokovic’s high-powered legal team kicked off an emergency appeal in Australia’s Federal Court.

The hearing will decide whether the Australian Open’s top seed and defending champion can retain his title and become the first male player in history to win 21 Grand Slams.

His lawyer Nick Wood sought to systematically dismantle the government’s central argument that Djokovic’s anti-vaccine views are a public threat and could cause “civil unrest” unless he is deported.

Despite the 34-year-old being unvaccinated, Wood insisted he has not courted anti-vaxxer support and was not associated with the movement.

The government “doesn’t know what Mr. Djokovic’s current views are,” Wood insisted.

Government lawyer Stephen Lloyd said the fact that Djokovic was not vaccinated two years into the pandemic and had repeatedly ignored safety measures — including failing to isolate while COVID-19 positive — was evidence enough of his views.

“He’s chosen not to go into evidence in this proceeding. He could set the record straight if it needed correcting. He has not — that has important consequences,” the government said in a written submission.

Lloyd also pointed to a series of protests already sparked by Djokovic’s arrival in Australia.

Those competing arguments will be weighed by a panel of three court justices, who are expected to give their verdict Sunday, or Monday at the latest.

Because of the format of the court, their decision will be extremely difficult to appeal by either side.

If the Serbian star loses, he will face immediate deportation and a three-year ban from Australia — dramatically lengthening his odds of winning a championship he has bagged nine times before.

‘We stand by you’

If he wins, it sets the stage for an audacious title tilt and will deal another humiliating blow to Australia’s embattled prime minister ahead of elections expected in May.

Scott Morrison’s government has tried and failed to remove Djokovic once before — on the grounds he was unvaccinated and that a recent COVID infection was not sufficient for a medical exemption.

A lower circuit judge ruled that officials at Melbourne airport made procedural errors when canceling his visa.

For a few days, Djokovic was free to train before a second visa revocation and a return to a notorious Melbourne immigration detention facility.

Many Australians — who have suffered prolonged lockdowns and border restrictions — believe Djokovic gamed the system to dodge vaccine entry requirements.

Experts say the case has taken on significance beyond the fate of one man who happens to be good at tennis.

“The case is likely to define how tourists, foreign visitors and even Australian citizens view the nation’s immigration policies and ‘equality before the law’ for years to come,” said Sanzhuan Guo, a law lecturer at Flinders University.

The case has also been seized on by culture warriors in the roiling debate over vaccines and how to handle the pandemic.

Australia’s immigration minister Alex Hawke has admitted that Djokovic is at “negligible” risk of infecting Australians but argued his past “disregard” for COVID-19 regulations may pose a risk to public health and encourage people to ignore pandemic rules.

The tennis ace contracted COVID-19 in mid-December and, according to his own account, failed to isolate despite knowing he was positive.

Public records show he attended a stamp unveiling, a youth tennis event, and granted a media interview around the time he got tested and his latest infection was confirmed.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic on Friday accused Australia of “mistreating” the country’s biggest star, and a national hero.

“If you wanted to ban Novak Djokovic from winning the 10th trophy in Melbourne, why didn’t you return him immediately, why didn’t you tell him, ‘It is impossible to obtain a visa’?” Vucic said on Instagram.

“Novak, we stand by you!”

‘With or without him’

Djokovic is currently tied with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal with 20 Grand Slam titles each.

Spanish great Nadal took a swipe at his rival on Saturday as players complained the scandal was overshadowing the opening Grand Slam of the year.

“The Australian Open is much more important than any player,” Nadal told reporters at Melbourne Park.

“The Australian Open will be a great Australian Open with or without him.”

Defending Australian Open women’s champion Naomi Osaka called the Djokovic saga “unfortunate” and “sad” and said it could be the defining moment of his career. 

 
…

Ahead of the February opening of the Winter Olympics in China, authorities are attempting to contain an outbreak of the omicron coronavirus variant in a southern city.

Officials in Zhuhai suspended the city’s bus service after uncovering seven cases of the highly contagious variant and advised residents to stay home.

In the next week or two, Americans will begin receiving free rapid home coronavirus tests from the U.S. government. Residents will have to request the tests on a designated website. The tests have been almost impossible to find in stores.

India’s health ministry on Saturday said it had recorded 268,833 new COVID cases, which is 4,631 more cases than were recorded Friday.

The Russian government on Friday delayed approving unpopular legislation that would have restricted access to public places without proof of COVID-19 vaccination, amid a surge in new infections.

The Associated Press reports the bill would have required Russians seeking to enter certain public places to have a QR code either confirming vaccination, recent recovery from COVID-19 or a medical exemption from immunization.

Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said the measure was pulled due to uncertainty regarding its effectiveness as it was drawn up in response to the delta variant of the virus that causes COVID-19. The omicron variant is currently driving a surge in new infections in the country.

She said 783 omicron variant cases have been confirmed across Russia. Moscow officials reported 729 confirmed omicron cases in the capital since Dec. 20.

Meanwhile, a French court suspended an outdoor mask requirement in the streets of Paris. The requirement had been imposed Dec. 31 in an effort to suppress the spread of the omicron variant.

A court in Versailles on Wednesday suspended a similar outdoor masking requirement for the Yvelines region.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Saturday that 323.7 million COVID cases have been recorded and 5.5 million deaths. The center said 9.6 billion vaccines have been administered.

 
…

An unprecedented, experimental attempt to feed manatees facing starvation in Florida has started slowly but wildlife officials expressed optimism Thursday that it will work as cold weather drives the marine mammals toward warmer waters.

A feeding station established along the state’s east coast has yet to entice wild manatees with romaine lettuce even though the animals will eat it in captivity, officials said on a news conference held remotely.

Water pollution from agricultural, urban and other sources has triggered algae blooms that have decimated seagrass beds on which manatees depend, leading to a record 1,101 manatee deaths largely from starvation in 2021. The typical five-year average is about 625 deaths.

That brought about the lettuce feeding program, part of a joint manatee death response group led by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It remains a violation of state and federal law for people to feed manatees on their own.

“We have not documented animals foraging on the lettuce,” said Ron Mezich, chief of the joint effort’s provisioning branch. “We know manatees will eat lettuce.”

During winter months, hundreds of manatees tend to congregate in warmer waters from natural springs and power plant discharges. Because this winter has been unusually mild in Florida so far, the animals have been more dispersed.

“They’re moving, but they are not being pressed by cold temperatures yet,” said Tom Reinert, south regional director for the FWC. “We expect that to happen.”

In addition to the feeding experiment, officials are working with a number of facilities to rehabilitate distressed manatees that are found alive. These include Florida zoos, the SeaWorld theme park and marine aquariums. There were 159 rescued manatees in 2021, some of which require lengthy care and some that have been returned to the wild, officials said.

“Our facilities are at or near capacity,” said Andy Garrett, chief of rescue and recovery. “These animals need long-term care. It’s been a huge amount of work to date.”

There are a minimum of 7,520 manatees in Florida waters currently, according to state statistics. The slow-moving, round-tailed mammals have rebounded enough to list them as a threatened species rather than endangered, although a push is on to restore the endangered tag given the starvation deaths.

Officials are also using $8 million in state money on several projects aimed at restoring manatee habitat and planting new seagrass beds, but that is a slow process and won’t ultimately solve the problem until the polluted waters are improved.

People can report any manatee they see that might be distressed by calling a wildlife hotline at 888-404-FWCC (3922). Other ways to help are donating money through a state-sponsored fund or purchasing a Save the Manatee vehicle license plate.

That’s better than feeding manatees personally, which does more harm than good because the animals will associate humans with food, according to officials. People and manatees have struggled to coexist for decades.

“This is a very serious situation,” Reinert said. “Use your dollars and not heads of lettuce.”
…

There’s more evidence that one of the world’s most common viruses may set some people on the path to developing multiple sclerosis. 

Multiple sclerosis is a potentially disabling disease that occurs when immune system cells mistakenly attack the protective coating on nerve fibers, gradually eroding them. 

The Epstein-Barr virus has long been suspected of playing a role in the development of MS. It’s a connection that’s hard to prove because just about everybody gets infected with Epstein-Barr, usually as kids or young adults, but only a tiny fraction develop MS.

On Thursday, Harvard researchers reported one of the largest studies yet to back the Epstein-Barr theory. 

They tracked blood samples stored from more than 10 million people in the U.S. military and found the risk of MS increased 32-fold following Epstein-Barr infection. 

The military regularly administers blood tests to its members, and the researchers checked samples stored from 1993-2013, looking for antibodies signaling viral infection. 

Just 5.3% of recruits showed no sign of Epstein-Barr when they joined the military. The researchers compared 801 MS cases subsequently diagnosed over the 20-year period with 1,566 service members who never got MS.

Only one of the MS patients had no evidence of the Epstein-Barr virus before the MS diagnosis. And despite intensive searching, the researchers found no evidence that other viral infections played a role. 

The findings “strongly suggest” that Epstein-Barr infection is “a cause and not a consequence of MS,” study author Dr. Alberto Ascherio of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and colleagues reported in the journal Science. 

It’s clearly not the only factor, considering that about 90% of adults have antibodies showing they’ve had Epstein-Barr, while nearly 1 million people in the U.S. are living with MS, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. 

The virus appears to be “the initial trigger,” Drs. William H. Robinson and Lawrence Steinman of Stanford University wrote in an editorial accompanying Thursday’s study. But they cautioned, “additional fuses must be ignited,” such as genes that may make people more vulnerable. 

Epstein-Barr is best known for causing “mono,” or infectious mononucleosis, in teens and young adults but often occurs with no symptoms. A virus that remains inactive in the body after initial infection, it also has been linked to later development of some autoimmune diseases and rare cancers. 

It’s not clear why. Among the possibilities is what’s called “molecular mimicry,” meaning viral proteins may look so similar to some nervous system proteins that it induces the mistaken immune attack. 

Regardless, the new study is “the strongest evidence to date that Epstein-Barr contributes to cause MS,” said Mark Allegretta, vice president for research at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

And that, he added, “opens the door to potentially prevent MS by preventing Epstein-Barr infection.” 

Attempts are underway to develop Epstein-Barr vaccines including a small study just started by Moderna Inc., best known for its COVID-19 vaccine. 
…

The white dome of the U.S. Capitol shone through the night, illuminating a small group huddled down the hill, bundled tightly against the winter cold and carrying binoculars and cameras with long lenses.

The motley crew were not there to photograph Washington’s famous monuments, they had their sights set on a rare creature that flew in from the arctic: a snowy owl.

“There he is!” shouted one of the birdwatchers.

The crowd shifted positions to get a better angle.

“It’s amazing,” said an enthused Meleia Rose, 41. “I’ve been a birder a long time, and this is my first time ever seeing a snowy owl.”

Birdwatching, or birding as it is also known, is a popular pastime in the United States, with hobbyists typically hiking through forests or camping in rural areas to spot different species of birds.

So the majestic owl’s appearance a week ago in the city, much further south than its usual habitat, has proved a magnet.

“You can see the Capitol,” Rose said, wrapped in a big winter coat and accompanied by her partner. “It’s arresting to have the contrast, the wildness with the city — but especially D.C. where it’s so … monumental and iconic.

The couple, who hired a babysitter for the occasion, got a good look at the rare bird, allowing them to mark “snowy owl” off their “life list,” a catalog of every bird they’ve seen.

Like others staring up at the young female owl, identified by its gray and white plumage, Rose was alerted to its arrival by eBird, a network used by birdwatchers to signal particularly interesting finds, which logged 200 million observations last year by 290,000 enthusiasts worldwide.

Users had pinpointed the snowy owl near Union Station, a bustling transportation hub just down the road from the Capitol, where a line of taxis curls around a grassy park, crisscrossed with walkways and dotted with tents set up by the homeless.

At the center of the park, on top of a marble fountain, a pair of yellow eyes peered out, searching for an evening snack, most likely one of the capital’s countless rats.

An ‘arctic visitor’

One recent visitor was Jacques Pitteloud, Switzerland’s ambassador to the United States and a passionate birdwatcher.

“The snowy owl has been on my list a long time,” Pitteloud told AFP, “but it’s truly extraordinary to see it in the middle of Washington, D.C.”

“She was truly the superstar of Union Station!” he added.

With broad white wings, these birds are “like a creature from another world,” explained Kevin McGowan, a professor with Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology.

Snowy owls live a good part of the year near the Arctic Circle, but most migrate south for the winter, usually stopping near the U.S. border with Canada.

Its visit so far south to Washington is “like having a polar bear coming by your neighborhood,” McGowan said.

“Snowy owls are such a charismatic bird,” noted Scott Weidensaul, the co-leader of Project SNOWstorm, a group that researches and tracks snowy owls.

“And particularly for birdwatchers in the Washington, D.C., area where it is an unusual event to see one down there. You know, that’s a big deal.”

In a black down jacket, Edward Eder was setting up his camera for a second night in a row. It’s equipped with an ultra-long lens for him to see the bird up close.

“A lot of people have taken up or become more enthusiastic birders during the pandemic,” explained the 71-year-old retiree, attributing the trend in part to the ability to easily social distance.

With their parents pointing the way, a small group of children attempt to catch a glimpse of the bird, which some may even recognize as kin to Hedwig, the snowy owl companion to Harry Potter in the cult book and movie series. 
…

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office apologized to Queen Elizabeth on Friday after it emerged that staff members partied late into the night in Downing Street on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral, when indoor gatherings were banned.

Johnson is facing the gravest crisis of his premiership after almost daily revelations of social gatherings during COVID-19 lockdowns, some held when ordinary people could not bid farewell in person to dying relatives.

As an opinion poll showed the opposition Labour Party pulling into a 10-point lead over Johnson’s Conservatives, a report said he had encouraged staff to “let off steam” during regular “wine-time Friday” gatherings.

Johnson, who built a political career out of flouting accepted norms, finds himself now under growing pressure from some of his own lawmakers to quit. Opponents say he is unfit to rule and has misled parliament by denying COVID-19 guidance was breached.

In an extraordinary twist to a saga that has been widely lampooned by comedians and cartoonists, the Daily Telegraph said drinking parties were held inside Downing Street on April 16, 2021, the day before Prince Philip’s funeral.

“It is deeply regrettable this took place at a time of national mourning and No. 10 (Downing Street) has apologized to the palace,” Johnson’s spokesperson told reporters.

Johnson was at his country residence that day and was not invited to any gathering, his spokesperson said.

Such was the revelry in Downing Street, the Telegraph said, that staff went to a nearby supermarket to buy a suitcase of alcohol, spilled wine on carpets, and broke a swing used by the prime minister’s son.

The next day, Queen Elizabeth bade farewell to Philip, her husband of 73 years, following his death at 99.

Dressed in black and in a white-trimmed black face mask, the 95-year-old Elizabeth cut a poignant figure as she sat alone, in strict compliance with coronavirus rules, during his funeral service at Windsor Castle.

Leave the stage

Opponents have called for Johnson, 57, to resign, casting him as a charlatan who demanded the British people follow some of the most onerous rules in peacetime history while his staff partied at the heart of government.

A small but growing number in Johnson’s Conservative Party have echoed those calls, fearing it will do lasting damage to its electoral prospects.

“Sadly, the prime minister’s position has become untenable,” said Conservative lawmaker Andrew Bridgen, a former Johnson supporter. “The time is right to leave the stage.”

In the latest report of rule-breaking, the Mirror newspaper said staff had bought a large wine fridge for Friday gatherings, events that were regularly observed by Johnson as he walked to his apartment in the building.

“If the PM tells you to ‘let off steam,’ he’s basically saying this is fine,” it quoted one source as saying.

Separately, the former head of the government unit behind COVID restrictions, Kate Josephs, apologized for holding her own party when she left the job in December 2020.

Johnson has given a variety of explanations of the parties, ranging from denials that any rules were broken to expressing understanding for the public anger at apparent hypocrisy at the heart of the British state.

The Independent newspaper said Johnson had dubbed a plan to salvage his premiership as “Operation Save Big Dog.”

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, seen as a possible successor, said “real mistakes” had been made.

“We need to look at the overall position we’re in as a country, the fact that he (Johnson) has delivered Brexit, that we are recovering from COVID. … He has apologized.”

“I think we now need to move on,” she said.

To trigger a leadership challenge, 54 of the 360 Conservative members of parliament must write letters of no confidence to the chairman of the party’s 1922 Committee.

The Telegraph said as many as 30 such letters had been submitted.

Johnson faces a tough year ahead: beyond COVID-19, inflation is soaring, energy bills are spiking, taxation will rise in April and his party faces local elections in May.

British police said Thursday they would not investigate gatherings held in Johnson’s residence during a coronavirus lockdown unless an internal government inquiry finds evidence of potential criminal offenses. 
…

U.S. health officials on Friday encouraged more Americans to wear the kind of N95 or KN95 masks used by health care workers to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Those kinds of masks are considered better at filtering the air. But they were in short supply previously, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials had previously said they should be prioritized for health care workers.

In updated guidance posted late Friday afternoon, CDC officials removed concerns related to supply shortages and more clearly said that properly fitted N95 and KN95 masks offer the most protection.

However, agency officials noted some masks are harder to tolerate than others and urged people to choose good-fitting masks that they will wear consistently.

“Our main message continues to be that any mask is better than no mask,” Kristen Nordlund, a CDC spokesperson, said in a statement.

The CDC has evolved its mask guidance throughout the pandemic.

In its last update, in September, CDC officials became more encouraging of disposable N95 masks, saying they could be used in certain situations if supplies were available. Examples included being near a lot of people for extended periods of time on a train, bus or airplane; taking care of someone in poor health; or being more susceptible to severe illness.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden announced that his administration was planning to make “high-quality masks,” including N95s, available for free. He said more details were coming next week. The federal government has a stockpile of more than 750 million N95 masks, the White House said.

The latest CDC guidance notes that there is a special category of “surgical N95” masks, that are specially designed for protection against blood splashes and other operating room hazards. Those are not generally available for sale to the public and should continue to be reserved for health care workers, the agency said. 
…

Martin Shkreli must return $64.6 million in profits he and his former company reaped from jacking up the price and monopolizing the market for a lifesaving drug, a federal judge ruled Friday while also barring the provocative, imprisoned ex-CEO from the pharmaceutical industry for the rest of his life. 

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote’s ruling came several weeks after a seven-day bench trial in December that featured recordings of conversations that Cote said showed Shkreli continuing to exert control over the company, Vyera Pharmaceuticals LLC, from behind bars and discussing ways to thwart generic versions of its lucrative drug, Daraprim. 

“Shkreli was no side player in, or a ‘remote, unrelated’ beneficiary of Vyera’s scheme,” Cote wrote in a 135-page opinion. “He was the mastermind of its illegal conduct and the person principally responsible for it throughout the years.” 

The Federal Trade Commission and seven states brought the case in 2020 against the man known in the media as “Pharma Bro,” about two years after he was sentenced to prison in an unrelated securities fraud scheme. 

“‘Envy, greed, lust, and hate,’ don’t just ‘separate,’ but they obviously motivated Mr. Shkreli and his partner to illegally jack up the price of a life-saving drug as Americans’ lives hung in the balance,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said, peppering the written statement with references to the Wu-Tang Clan, whose one-of-a-kind album Shkreli had to fork over to satisfy court debt. 

“But Americans can rest easy because Martin Shkreli is a pharma bro no more.” 

Messages seeking comment were left with Shkreli’s lawyers. 

Shkreli was CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals — later Vyera — when it raised the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill after obtaining exclusive rights to the decades-old drug in 2015. It treats a rare parasitic disease that strikes pregnant women, cancer patients and AIDS patients. 

Shkreli defended the decision as capitalism at work and said insurance and other programs ensured that people who need Daraprim would ultimately get it. 

Shkreli eventually offered hospitals half off — still amounting to a 2,500% increase. But patients normally take most of the weekslong treatment after returning home, so they and their insurers still faced the $750-a-pill price. 

Shkreli resigned as Turing’s CEO in 2015, a day after he was arrested on securities fraud charges related to two failed hedge funds he ran before getting into the pharmaceutical industry. He was convicted of lying to investors and cheating them out of millions and is serving a seven-year sentence at a federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, and is scheduled to be released in November. 

The FTC and seven states — New York, California, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia — alleged in their case that Vyera hiked the price of Daraprim and illegally created “a web of anticompetitive restrictions” to prevent other companies from creating cheaper generic versions. Among other things, they alleged, Vyera blocked access to a key ingredient for the medication and to data the companies would want to evaluate the drug’s market potential. 

Vyera and its parent company, Phoenixus AG, settled last month, agreeing to provide up to $40 million in relief over 10 years to consumers and to make Daraprim available to any potential generic competitor at the cost of producing the drug. Former Vyera CEO Kevin Mulleady agreed to pay $250,000 if he violates the settlement, which barred him from working for a pharmaceutical company” for seven years. 

Shkreli proceeded to trial but opted not to attend the proceedings, instead submitting a written affidavit that served as his testimony. 

The trial record included evidence showing Shkreli kept in regular contact with company executives, even after he went to prison. A spreadsheet kept by one executive showed more than 1,500 contacts with Shkreli between December 2019 and July 2020. 

The record also included recordings of conversations Shkreli had from prison in which he discussed his control of Vyera, saying he had “no problem firing everybody,” boasting how he controlled the board, and comparing himself to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the pharmaceutical company to the social media behemoth. 

 
…

The World Health Organization is recommending two new drugs for the treatment of COVID-19, adding to a growing list of therapeutic remedies for the deadly disease.

Baricitinib is an oral medication recommended for patients with severe or critical COVID-19.It is part of a class of drugs that suppresses the overstimulation of the immune system and is used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

WHO team lead for clinical care, Janet Diaz, says the drug should be given along with corticosteroids, a type of anti-inflammatory treatment. She notes three clinical trials of 2,600 people showed a drop in the mortality of patients with coronavirus infections once they received baricitinib.

She says WHO has also conditionally recommended the use of a monoclonal antibody drug called sotrovimab for treating patients with COVID-19 who have mild or moderate disease. 

“Conditional for those patients that are of the highest risk for complications,” Diaz said. “This would include patients who are older age, unvaccinated or have underlying conditions. This recommendation is based upon one trial, a well-done trial with just over 1,000 patients. And this trial showed a reduction for the need for hospitalization.”

Studies are ongoing on the effectiveness of monoclonal antibodies against the omicron variant. While Diaz says early laboratory studies show that sotrovimab continues to be effective against the new coronavirus strain, she says she would not call the drug a game changer.

“I think we have multiple therapeutic options right now for COVID-19 and more are on the way,” she said. “Unfortunately, viruses are known to develop resistance to certain drugs. So, SARS COVID-2 is not different in that respect … and if something happens where the resistance does develop, we try to hopefully reduce the chances that happens.”

The WHO official says other therapeutics are in the pipeline.

She says WHO is committed to equitable and affordable access for all member-states to COVID-19 drugs, and the agency and partners are meeting with pharmaceutical companies to negotiate fair prices and access for low- and middle-income countries to life-saving treatments. 

 
…

To mask or not to mask is a question Italy settled early in the COVID-19 outbreak with a vigorous “yes.” Now the onetime epicenter of the pandemic in Europe hopes even stricter mask rules will help it beat the latest infection surge.

Other countries are taking similar action as the more transmissible — yet, apparently, less virulent — omicron variant spreads through the continent.

With Italy’s hospital ICUs rapidly filling with mostly unvaccinated COVID-19 patients, the government announced on Christmas Eve that FFP2 masks — which offer users more protection than cloth or surgical masks — must be worn on public transport, including planes, trains, ferries and subways.

That’s even though all passengers in Italy, as of this week, must be vaccinated or recently recovered from COVID-19. FFP2s also must now be worn at theaters, cinemas and sports events, indoors or out, and can’t be removed even for their wearers to eat or drink.

Italy re-introduced an outdoor mask mandate. It had never lifted its indoor mandate — even when infections sharply dropped in the summer.

On a chilly morning in Rome this week, Lillo D’Amico, 84, sported a wool cap and white FFP2 as he bought a newspaper at his neighborhood newsstand.

“(Masks) cost little money, they cost you a small sacrifice,” he said. “When you do the math, it costs far less than hospitalization.”

When he sees someone from the unmasked minority walking by, he keeps a distance. “They see (masks) as an affront to their freedom,” D’Amico said, shrugging.

Spain reinstated its outdoor mask rule on Christmas Eve. After the 14-day contagion rate soared to 2,722 new infections per 100,000 people by the end of last week — from 40 per 100,000 in mid-October — Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was asked whether the outdoor mask mandate was helping.

“Of course, it is. It’s not me saying it. It’s science itself saying it because (it’s) a virus that is contracted when one exhales,” Sanchez said.

Portugal brought masks back at the end of November, after having largely dropped the requirement when it hit its goal of vaccinating 86% of the population.

Greece has also restored its outdoor mask mandate, while requiring an FFP2 or double surgical mask on public transport and in indoor public spaces.

This week the Dutch government’s outbreak management team recommended a mask mandate for people over 13 in busy public indoor areas such as restaurants, museums and theaters, and for spectators at indoor sports events. Those places are currently closed under a lockdown until at least Friday.

In France, the outdoor mask mandate was partially re-instated in December in many cities, including Paris. The age for children to start wearing masks in public places was lowered to 6 from 11.

Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer announced last week that people must wear FFP2 masks outdoors if they can’t keep at least 2 meters apart.

In Italy, with more than 2 million people currently positive for the virus in a nation of 60 million and workplace absences curtailing train and bus runs, the government also sees masks as a way to let society more fully function.

People with booster shots or recent second vaccine doses can now avoid quarantine after coming into contact with an infected person if they wear a FFP2 mask for 10 days.

The government has ordered shops to make FFP masks available for 85 U.S. cents. In the pandemic’s first year, FFP2s cost up to $11.50 — whenever they could be found.

Italians wear them in a palette of colors. The father of a baby baptized this week by Pope Francis in the Sistine Chapel wore one in burgundy, with matching tie and jacket pocket square. But the pontiff, who has practically shunned a mask in public, was maskless.

On Monday, Vatican City State mandated FFP2s in all indoor places. The tiny, walled independent state across the Tiber from the heart of Rome also stipulated that Vatican employees can go to work without quarantining after coming into contact with someone testing positive if, in addition to being fully vaccinated or having received a booster shot, they wear FFP2s.

Francis did appear to be wearing a FFP2 when, startling shoppers in Rome on Tuesday evening, he emerged from a music store near the Pantheon before being driven back to the Vatican.

In Britain, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson has focused on vaccination, masks have never been required outdoors.

This month, though, the government said secondary school students should wear face coverings in class. But Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said that rule wouldn’t apply “for a day longer than necessary.”

When the British government lifted pandemic restrictions in July 2021, turning mask-wearing from a requirement to a suggestion, mask use fell markedly.

Nino Cartabellotta, president of the Bologna-based GIMBE foundation, which monitors health care in Italy, says Britain points to what can happen when measures like mask-wearing aren’t valued.

“The situation in the U.K, showed that use of vaccination alone wasn’t enough” to get ahead of the pandemic, even though Britain was one of the first countries to begin vaccination, he said in a video interview. 

 
…

Drones sprayed holy water from the Ganges on thousands of Hindu pilgrims on Friday to reduce crowding during a massive festival being held despite soaring COVID-19 cases in India.

The Gangasagar Mela in the east of the country has drawn comparisons with another “superspreader” Hindu gathering last year that the Hindu nationalist government refused to ban. It was blamed in part for a devastating COVID surge.

Officials had said they expected around 3 million people — including ash-smeared, dreadlocked ascetics — to attend the festival’s climax on Sagar Island, where the Ganges meets the Bay of Bengal.

“At the crack of dawn, there was a sea of people,” local official Bankim Hazra told AFP by telephone.

“Holy water from the river Ganges was sprayed from drones on pilgrims … to prevent crowding,” he said.

“But the saints and a large number of people were bent on taking the dip… Pilgrims, most of them without masks, outnumbered the security personnel.”

An AFP photographer said that there were fewer people than in recent years and that rain put off some pilgrims from making the journey.

But there were still huge crowds, mostly without masks, taking a holy dip in the river.

A police official on duty at the event said that it was “impossible” to enforce COVID restrictions.

“Most pilgrims are bent on defying the rules,” he said.

“They believe that God will save them and bathing at the confluence will cleanse all their sins and even the virus if they are infected.”

No lockdown

Fatalities from India’s current wave of infections remain a fraction of what they were during the surge in April and May last year, with 315 deaths recorded Thursday compared with as many as 4,000 per day at the peak.

Infections are rising fast, however, with almost 265,000 new cases Thursday. Some models predict India could experience as many as 800,000 cases per day in a few weeks, twice the rate seen nine months ago.

Keen to avoid another painful lockdown for millions of workers reliant on a few dollars in daily wages, authorities in different parts of India have sought to restrict gatherings.

In New Delhi, all bars, restaurants and private offices are shut, and the capital is set to go into its second weekend curfew on Friday night.

In the financial capital of Mumbai, gatherings of more than four people are banned.

But in West Bengal state, the Calcutta High Court on Friday allowed the Gangasagar Mela to proceed.

As with 2021’s Kumbh Mela, it has attracted people from across northern India who, after cramming onto trains, buses and boats to reach the island, will then go home — potentially taking the highly transmissible omicron virus variant with them.

Amitava Nandy, a virologist from the School of Tropical Medicines in Kolkata, said the government “has neither the facilities nor the manpower” to test everyone attending or impose social distancing.

“A stampede-like situation could happen if the police try to enforce social distancing on the riverbank,” Nandy told AFP.

Devotee Sarbananda Mishra, a 56-year-old schoolteacher from the neighboring state of Bihar, told AFP: “Faith in God will overcome the fear of COVID. The bathing will cleanse them of all their sins and bring salvation.

“Death is the ultimate truth. What is the point of living with fear?” 

 
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A 4-billion-year-old meteorite from Mars that caused a splash here on Earth decades ago contains no evidence of ancient, primitive Martian life after all, scientists reported Thursday. 

In 1996, a NASA-led team announced that organic compounds in the rock appeared to have been left by living creatures. Other scientists were skeptical, and researchers chipped away at that premise over the decades, most recently by a team led by the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Andrew Steele. 

Tiny samples from the meteorite show the carbon-rich compounds are actually the result of water — most likely salty, or briny, water — flowing over the rock for a prolonged period, Steele said. The findings appear in the journal Science. 

During Mars’ wet and early past, at least two impacts occurred near the rock, heating the planet’s surrounding surface, before a third impact bounced it off the red planet and into space millions of years ago. The 2-kilogram (4-pound) rock was found in Antarctica in 1984. 

Groundwater moving through the cracks in the rock, while it was still on Mars, formed the tiny globs of carbon that are present, according to the researchers. The same thing can happen on Earth and could help explain the presence of methane in Mars’ atmosphere, they said. 

But two scientists who took part in the original study took issue with these latest findings, calling them disappointing. In a shared email, they said they stand by their 1996 observations. 

“While the data presented incrementally adds to our knowledge of (the meteorite), the interpretation is hardly novel, nor is it supported by the research,” wrote Kathie Thomas-Keprta and Simon Clemett, astromaterial researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. 

“Unsupported speculation does nothing to resolve the conundrum surrounding the origin of organic matter” in the meteorite, they added. 

According to Steele, advances in technology made his team’s new findings possible. 

He commended the measurements by the original researchers and noted that their life-claiming hypothesis “was a reasonable interpretation” at the time. He said he and his team, which includes NASA, German and British scientists, took care to present their results “for what they are, which is a very exciting discovery about Mars and not a study to disprove” the original premise. 

This finding “is huge for our understanding of how life started on this planet and helps refine the techniques we need to find life elsewhere on Mars, or Enceladus and Europa,” Steele said in an email, referring to Saturn and Jupiter’s moons with subsurface oceans. 

The only way to prove whether Mars ever had or still has microbial life, according to Steele, is to bring samples to Earth for analysis. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has collected six samples for return to Earth in a decade or so; three dozen samples are desired. 

Millions of years after drifting through space, the meteorite landed on an icefield in Antarctica thousands of years ago. The small gray-green fragment got its name — Allan Hills 84001 — from the hills where it was found. 

 
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The Supreme Court has stopped the Biden administration from enforcing a requirement that employees at large businesses be vaccinated against COVID-19 or undergo weekly testing and wear a mask on the job.

At the same time, the court is allowing the administration to proceed with a vaccine mandate for most health care workers in the U.S. 

The court’s orders Thursday during a spike in coronavirus cases was a mixed bag for the administration’s efforts to boost the vaccination rate among Americans. 

The court’s conservative majority concluded the administration overstepped its authority by seeking to impose the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccine-or-test rule on U.S. businesses with at least 100 employees. More than 80 million people would have been affected.

‘Never before’

“OSHA has never before imposed such a mandate. Nor has Congress. Indeed, although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here,” the conservatives wrote in an unsigned opinion. 

In dissent, the court’s three liberals argued that it was the court that was overreaching by substituting its judgment for that of health experts. 

“Acting outside of its competence and without legal basis, the Court displaces the judgments of the Government officials given the responsibility to respond to workplace health emergencies,” Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a joint dissent. 

When crafting the OSHA rule, White House officials always anticipated legal challenges — and privately some harbored doubts that it could withstand them. The administration nonetheless still views the rule as a success at prompting millions of people to get vaccinated and private businesses to implement their own requirements that are unaffected by the legal challenge. 

Both rules had been challenged by Republican-led states. In addition, business groups attacked the OSHA emergency regulation as too expensive and likely to cause workers to leave their jobs at a time when finding new employees is difficult. 

The vaccine mandate that the court will allow to be enforced nationwide covers virtually all health care workers in the country. It applies to health care providers that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid funding, potentially affecting 76,000 health care facilities as well as home health care providers. The rule has medical and religious exemptions. 

Previously blocked in many states

Decisions by federal appeals courts in New Orleans and St. Louis had blocked the mandate in about half the states. The administration was taking steps to enforce it elsewhere. 

In the health care case, only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito noted their dissents. 

“The challenges posed by a global pandemic do not allow a federal agency to exercise power that Congress has not conferred upon it. At the same time, such unprecedented circumstances provide no grounds for limiting the exercise of authorities the agency has long been recognized to have,” the justices wrote in an unsigned opinion, saying the “latter principle governs” in the health care cases. 

More than 208 million Americans, 62.7% of the population, are fully vaccinated, and more than a third of those have received booster shots, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All nine justices have gotten booster shots. 

The justices heard arguments on the challenges last week. Their questions then hinted at the split verdict that they issued Thursday. 
…

Two U.S. government agencies – space agency NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said Thursday 2021 was the sixth hottest year on record.

In separate reports, the agencies also said their data indicates the last eight years were the eight hottest since modern recordkeeping began. They also said global temperatures in 2021 were .85 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average. NOAA says last year was also the 45th year – since 1977 – average global temperatures rose above the 20th century average.

The agencies’ data shows global temperatures, averaged over a 10-year period to take out natural variability, are nearly 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer than 140 years ago.

In an interview with reporters, NOAA analysis chief Russell Vose said it is “warmer now than any time in at least the past 2,000 years, and probably much longer.” He predicted 2022 would also be among the warmest years ever.

Both agencies attributed weather anomalies from the past year, like melting sea ice, severe wildfires, and record flooding, as attributable to the warming climate.

NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt told the Associated Press the long-term trend is “very, very clear. And it’s because of us. And it’s not going to go away until we stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, and Reuters.

 
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