Double mask recommendation - Saudi arms sales halted - EU-UK vaccine spat

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, President Biden's nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, pledged to take a tougher line against China during her Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday. It was an effort to show she would be tough on China, while also expressing remorse for giving a speech at a Chinese-funded foundation based on a university campus in Savannah, Ga., in 2019.
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"This speech is cheerleading for the Chinese Communist Party," Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said during the hearing. Thomas-Greenfield pushed back on that characterization, saying [she] has a long record in her career as a foreign service officer of calling out China for predatory lending practices in Africa and human rights abuses.
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If confirmed, Thomas-Greenfield will represent the Biden administration at the U.N. during a period of renewed racial tensions in the United States. In March, the U.S. will assume the presidency of the 15-member United Nations Security Council. President Biden has elevated the position of U.N. ambassador to cabinet level, giving another Black woman a prominent post within his administration.

At the core of the problem are production delays at separate factories in Belgium that make the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and the one developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. European officials have implied that AstraZeneca, headquartered in Britain, sent vaccines to Britain that were meant for the continent instead.
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The European Union, stung by its slow progress on vaccinations, threatened this week to tighten rules on the shipment of Belgian-made shots to Britain. British lawmakers, in turn, have accused their European counterparts of a blackmail campaign that could embitter relations for a generation.
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Many European countries, rich and poor, have been hoping that the arrival of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine would hasten the pace of vaccinations, owing to its lower price and simpler storage requirements, compared to those from Pfizer and Moderna. The bloc’s drug regulators are expected to authorize the vaccine on Friday, a month after Britain did.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken clarified that it was not uncommon "at the start of an administration to review any pending sales to make sure that what is being considered is something that advances our strategic objectives and advances our foreign policy." UAE's ambassador to the U.S. [said] in response that his country would work closely with the Biden administration on Middle East peace.
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The UAE has long expressed interest in acquiring the F-35 jets and was promised a chance to buy them in a side deal when it agreed to normalize ties with Israel last August. The sale has also brought into question whether it would jeopardize Israel's military qualitative edge in the region.
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During the presidential campaign, candidate Joe Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah,” broadly promising to confront the Kingdom on its human rights record and end U.S. support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen. Blinken echoed that promise in his confirmation hearing, calling Yemen "the worst humanitarian situation in the world."

[Melvin Capital Management], which has lost 30% of the $12.5bn (£9.1bn) it manages this year, was outmanoeuvred by an army of Reddit users from the forum “Wall Street Bets”. The group sought to punish the financial giants betting against GameStop by sending the chain’s shares soaring.
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The army of traders have declared war on the Wall Street companies looking to “short” GameStop, which involves “borrowing” a company’s shares and selling them with the intention of buying them back cheaper when the company’s share price falls, and it has proved to cost them billions.
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The meteoric rise has been fuelled by small investors snapping up the stock when it was cheap, using the trading app Robinhood and other services, seeing it as an opportunity to make money if the company can recover. The company’s shares soared another 135% on Wednesday to over $347, up from $3 last April.

The discovery of highly transmissible coronavirus variants in the United States has public health experts urging Americans to upgrade the simple cloth masks. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, touted double-masking during a Monday appearance on the “Today” show, saying two layers “just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.”
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In recent weeks, European countries have begun mandating medical-grade masks in public settings as the virus strain first identified in the United Kingdom threatens to ravage communities. British scientists estimate it could be as much as 70 percent more transmissible.
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“Those standard cloth masks might be around 50 percent effective in terms of protecting yourself,” [Linsey Marr, a Virginia Tech engineering professor who has researched mask effectiveness] said. “Maybe that was good enough before when combined with distancing and trying to avoid being in crowded indoor spaces.”