Courtney Vinopal

So you think you’ve been exposed to covid-19.

John Madden was a Hall of Fame coach who brought the Oakland Raiders to a Super Bowl victory before transitioning to broadcast television, where he won 16 Emmy awards for his sports analysis across multiple networks.

The US cruise industry was just starting to get back to normal when the omicron variant came along and rocked the boat.

Spider-Man: No Way Home surpassed $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales over the weekend, the first movie to do so since the coronavirus pandemic. The sequel to the 2019 film Spider-Man: Far From Home, which was released by Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures exclusively in theaters, brought in $1.05 billion globally over just 12 days, and did so without the world’s biggest movie market: China.

The travel disruptions have revived discussions of what more should be done to protect both staff and passengers on US flights from the coronavirus.

US drugstore chains CVS and Walgreens are limiting the number of rapid at-home covid-19 test individual customers can buy at one time, in response to a surge in demand ahead of the holidays.

The White House announced measures today (Dec. 21) to increase access to covid-19 testing in response to the omicron variant, which now accounts for the majority of cases in the US. The Biden administration plans to ramp up test production, and will set up new federal testing sites, starting in New York City. It will also offer 500 million free at-home rapid tests to Americans beginning in January.

Faced with a covid-19 surge affecting more than 100 players, the National Football League (NFL) made a surprising decision over the weekend: to test vaccinated players less—not more—frequently.

A federal judge in New York yesterday (Dec. 16) delivered a decision that could open up the Sackler family to further legal scrutiny over its role in the opioid crisis. For years the Sacklers have battled lawsuits tying their company, Purdue Pharma, which manufactures the highly addictive narcotic medication OxyContin, to a public health crisis that has claimed the lives of half a million Americans. The family was granted immunity from additional lawsuits for the opioid epidemic through a bankruptcy settlement in September.

On the same week that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was named “person of the year” by both Time magazine and the Financial Times, two of his companies were hit with a slew of new sexual harassment allegations.

Bruce Springsteen has reportedly sold the masters of his entire catalog, as well as the music publishing rights, to Sony Music. The combined deal, which was first reported by Billboard, is estimated to be worth $500 million. Sony now owns all of Springsteen’s original recordings as well as the intellectual property of the compositions.

Update: The Biden administration on Dec. 22 announced that it will extend the student loan payment freeze through May 1, 2022.

The UK government announced today (Dec. 14) that it’s scrapping its “red list,” which currently restricts travelers from African nations coming into England, at 4am local time on Dec. 15. The international travel restrictions are now less effective because the omicron variant “has spread so widely across the world,” said British health secretary Sajid Javid.

Nike announced its first substantial foray into the metaverse yesterday (Dec. 13) with the purchase of RTFKT (pronounced “artifact,” of course), a non-fungible token (NFT) studio that produces digital collectibles, including virtual sneakers. They did not disclose the value of the deal.

Apple came within reach of a $3 trillion market capitalization today (Dec. 13), a marker no publicly traded company has ever touched before.

Time magazine has named Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as its 2021 person of the year. “Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too,” said the magazine’s editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal. “In 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world’s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society.”

US workers saw a pay bump in November, as average hourly earnings rose by nearly 5% from the previous year, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released today (Dec. 10). But higher inflation is wiping out those gains, eroding consumers’ purchasing power and leaving them in a worse economic position than prior to the pandemic.

Approximately 1,400 Kellogg’s union workers have been on strike since Oct. 5 at factories in Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee over outstanding issues in their contract negotiations. The workers, who are represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union, rejected a tentative agreement offered by Kellogg’s on Dec. 7.

It’s been one year since the first covid-19 vaccine was administered to 90-year-old Margaret Keenan in the UK. That moment, said UK health secretary Matt Hancock at the time, marked “the start of the fightback against our common enemy, the coronavirus.”

For years the United Arab Emirates workforce, like most Persian Gulf nations, has worked Sunday-Thursday with a weekend on Friday and Saturday. But today (Dec. 7) the government announced it will move its weekend to Saturday and Sunday, with a half-day of rest on Friday.

It may be fair to assume that the CEO of the world’s biggest electric-vehicle company would be on board with US president Joe Biden’s intense focus on EVs. But Tesla’s Elon Musk criticized proposed US federal spending on electric vehicles yesterday (Dec. 6) in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, saying, “honestly, I would just can this whole bill, don’t pass it.”

The White House announced today (Dec. 6) the US will stage a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics in February in response to alleged human rights abuses by the country, including the repression and genocide of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration will not send any diplomatic or official representatives to the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic games and will instead support athletes from the US.

New York City rolled out the US’s first covid-19 vaccine mandate covering all private-sector workers today (Dec. 6) as winter approaches and the new omicron variant is circulating worldwide. The mandate, which will affect roughly 184,000 businesses, will take effect Dec. 27.

Officials urged thousands of attendees of a recent anime convention in New York City to get tested for covid-19 yesterday (Dec. 2) after a Minnesota man who attended the event tested positive for the omicron variant. It was the second confirmed case of omicron in the US, and occurred in a person who had been vaccinated for covid-19.