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Unvaccinated NBA Players, Staff Must Test Weekly for COVID
Unvaccinated NBA players and team personnel must submit to weekly COVID-19 testing this season, the league told its clubs in a memo Tuesday.
There will be certain exceptions to that mandate, the league said, such as when the unvaccinated person is considered to have been “recently recovered” from COVID-19.
But for all others, testing will not be required except when “directed by their team physician or a league physician or government authority,” the league said. Facemasks also will not be required, though they will be recommended for use indoors in markets where coronavirus levels are classified by government officials as high.
Goldman Sachs Lifts COVID Vaccine and Testing Mandate for Many Employees
Goldman Sachs will no longer require its non-New York City-based employees to get vaccinated for COVID-19, according to a memo obtained by CNN.
The Wall Street investment bank told staff in a memo on Tuesday that effective Sept. 6, all employees can enter its offices in the Americas, “regardless of vaccination status,” with no requirement to participate in regular testing or wear face coverings.
The new Goldman Sachs COVID policy, first reported by the New York Post, does not apply to New York City, which has a vaccine mandate in place. Goldman Sachs, whose headquarters is in Lower Manhattan, said NYC employees without an approved exemption should continue to work remotely.
Contractors in ‘Uncharted Water’ With Narrowed Vaccine Mandate
An Eleventh Circuit order allowing President Joe Biden to enforce his COVID-19 vaccination mandate for federal contractors in some states is likely to sow further confusion among businesses with government pacts.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit handed the administration a partial victory on Aug. 26, narrowing a nationwide injunction from a federal court in Georgia last year blocking the mandate. The ruling, and a patchwork of previous injunctions blocking the mandate in more than two dozen states, have put contractors on edge as they await the government’s response to the Eleventh Circuit decision.
The appeals court agreed that Biden’s vaccine rule, which applied to roughly a quarter of the U.S. workforce and affected companies that do business with the federal government, is too broad. It said the administration likely overreached its statutory authority in regulating contracts under federal procurement law.
If the administration enforces the mandate in states not covered by ongoing litigation, attorneys said it would cause chaos and compliance headaches for contractors, because courts have either blocked enforcement in certain states or nationwide. The mixed rulings would also make it tricky for the government to enforce the mandate, they added.
Unvaccinated Cadets Ordered off Coast Guard Academy Campus
The Coast Guard Academy is disenrolling seven cadets for failing to comply with the military’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate after their requests for religious exemptions were denied and they were ordered to leave campus.
The academy in New London, Connecticut, confirmed the disenrollments Tuesday, The Day newspaper reported. A lawyer for several of the cadets said they were told on Aug. 18 that they had to leave campus by 4 p.m. the next day.
“They were escorted to the gate like they were criminals or something,” the lawyer, Michael Rose, told the newspaper. Rose said two of the seven cadets had no homes to return to.
The cadets’ names have not been released. Rose said academy officials were “particularly mean-spirited” and could have waited until pending lawsuits challenging the military’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement were concluded.
Queensland Government to Make ‘Discriminatory’ Pay Cut to Unvaccinated School Staff
Nearly 1,000 school staff in Queensland, including teachers, aides, administration and cleaners, will have a portion of their salaries cut for 18 weeks as a disciplinary measure for not being vaccinated against COVID-19.
Mandates were handed to teachers, prison staff and airport staff in Nov. 2021. Those who failed to comply or provide evidence as to why they should be exempt from having had the first jab by Dec. 17 and the second by Jan. 23, 2022, were suspended without pay.
The requirement ended in June 2022, and staff has been allowed to return to work.
The new pay docking would be the second time the teachers are penalized financially after already being stood down without pay.
China Places Millions Into COVID Lockdown Again as Economy Continues to Struggle
China has placed millions of its citizens under renewed lockdown after fresh outbreaks of COVID-19 as the government persists in its hardline policy on containing the virus in the face of more evidence that it is suffocating the economy.
The measures affected cities from the southern cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou to the northern port city of Dalian, and from the western metropolis of Chengdu to Shijiazhuang in central Hebei province.
The lockdown in Dalian was expected to affect about half of its six million residents and was due to last five days, although authorities have in the past extended restrictions depending on the number of new cases.
Australia Orders Tech Giants Apple, Microsoft, Snap and Meta to Step up Actions Against Child Abuse Material
Australian authorities have ordered global tech giants to report on the actions they have taken to stop the spread of child sexual exploitation materials on their platforms and will impose penalties on non-compliant companies.
Among the companies receiving legal notices from the eSafety Commissioner are Apple, Microsoft, Snap, Omegle and Meta, which owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.
The move is in accordance with the Online Safety Act 2021, which eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant described as a “world-leading tool.” The act includes basic online safety expectations detailing minimum requirements that tech companies have to meet if they want to operate in Australia.
For instance, online service providers are expected to minimize harmful materials or activities on their platforms proactively. And if they use encryption, they need to develop and implement processes to detect and address child abuse materials.
To Trace Big Tech Competition, Follow the Money
The best way to understand the ways that Big Tech companies do and don’t compete with one another is to use the old Watergate adage: Follow the money.
Why it matters: How Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft make their revenue today shapes the battles they will fight tomorrow.
Like wealthy families that have run a town for decades, these companies share a vast web of dependencies and grudges — as in the recent privacy war between Facebook and Apple, or Apple’s slow and steady effort to wrest the mobile maps market out of Google’s control.
Here’s what you find when you “follow the money” for each of tech’s Big 5:
Twitter Isn’t a Public Square. It’s a Coliseum.
Social media has been compared to a public square so often that it has become cliché. Members of Congress, academics, the U.S. Supreme Court, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey have all called social media the modern “public square.”
The idea is even at the heart of Elon Musk‘s bid for Twitter: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy,” the acquisition announcement reads, “and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
Are they right? Is social media a place where everyone comes together to see what’s happening and talk about today’s important ideas?
For the past several years, our organization has been tracking how voters feel about today’s most important policy issues around tech platforms, social media and free speech online. The data points to similarities between social media and a very different type of public space: a coliseum.
Snap Cuts 20% of Staff Amid Major Restructuring
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel announced this morning that the company behind Snapchat will reduce its staff by 20% as part of a larger restructuring.
Snap has struggled financially for months. In May, Spiegel wrote in an internal memo that the company would miss its revenue goals for the second quarter of the year. Sure enough, even though revenue for the quarter was $1.11 billion, up 13% year over year, the company badly missed its previous guidance of 20% to 25% growth.
