Biden’s Omicron Plan | Salvaging Build Back Better | Robinhood’s Banned List

Plus: The Biggest Losers: These Billionaires’ Fortunes Fell $152 Billion In 2021

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“Should we just send one to every American?” was White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s dismissive response to the idea of offering free rapid Covid tests earlier this month. Now the White House plans to ship 500 million at-home tests starting in January as President Joe Biden adopts Plan B to tackle the omicron Covid surge. Democrats are also going back to the drawing board on the stalled Build Back Better bill with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying she’s “not deterred at all” as Senator Joe Manchin’s outlines a controversial way forward, while Robinhood has become the latest fintech to bar transactions with a set of digital banks over fraud concerns. And finally, meet the 10 billionaires who each lost at least $10 billion this year. 

In The News Today

President Joe Biden on Tuesday is set to announce several steps to tackle omicron, including distributing 500 million free rapid tests to the public and deploying more than 1,000 military medical personnel to aid overburdened hospitals, a move that comes as the highly infectious omicron variant is now the dominant one in the U.S.

The NHL is the first major American sporting league to suspend its season amid the current nationwide Covid-19 surge.

Top Take-Aways

Top Democrats are vowing they will continue pushing for the Build Back Better legislation, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saying Monday she's "not deterred at all" after Senator Joe Manchin appeared to deliver a fatal blow to President Joe Biden’s proposed $2 trillion social spending package.

Just as the busy holiday travel season gets underway, the omicron variant of coronavirus is quickly driving up the number of new Covid-19 cases around the country and compelling cities and states to impose a fresh round of face mask mandates. Dr Anthony Fauci again pressed the need to mask up for holiday travel while Spain, Monaco and Finland were moved to the CDC’s “avoid travel” list.

Robinhood has become the latest fintech to resort to the blunt instrument of a banned list of transfer institutions—heavily populated with digital banks—as a bid to fight fraud while the popular free stock trading app grapples with its own security issues.

Payments giant Visa could be calling time on a sketchy workaround dubbed the “cashless ATM” that has helped parts of the $25 billion marijuana industry accept card payments, while reforms that would allow banks to handle cannabis transactions remain stalled in Washington.

Over the last two decades, tech giants have had to deal with an ever-growing deluge of videos and images of child sexual abuse on their platforms. The extent of Google’s scanning for such imagery on its cloud services is wider than previously thought.

China’s Ding billionaire family that controls Anta Sports—one of the world’s largest sportswear businesses—will donate 84.5 million shares worth nearly $1.2 billion to a charity amid the Chinese government’s “common prosperity” crackdown on the country’s wealth gap.

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