 The federal government will start distributing 400 million free N95 masks around the U.S. next week, according to White House officials. The masks, which are coming from the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile, will be available at tens of thousands of health centers and pharmacies. Scientists have said that N95s or KN95s are preferable to cloth masks or surgical masks to prevent the spread of omicron. The CDC recently recommended these masks over other options, when available. More: - Three masks will be available per adult. The government also plans to make high-quality masks for children freely available in the near future.
- It will be the largest deployment of personal protective equipment in the history of the U.S., a White House official told The Washington Post.
- Early in the pandemic, Americans were encouraged to wear cloth masks as a stopgap measure while supplies of higher-quality respirators were low.
- Now, however, there is no such shortage of N95s or KN95s, though access to them is not universal because of cost.
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 The University of Michigan has reached a $490M settlement with more than 1,000 people who accused former university doctor Robert Anderson of abuse over a period of decades. The settlement sets aside $460M for the 1,050 claimants and $30M for any future claimants. Anderson worked for the University of Michigan from 1966 to 2003 as a director of campus health services and served as a physician for multiple athletic teams. He died in 2008. More: - A report released last year showed that officials at the university had many opportunities to become aware of and prevent sexual misconduct from Anderson's office, but failed to act.
- A large number of Anderson's victims were young male athletes. They include football player Dwight Hicks, who would go on to win two Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers in the 1980s, and former Olympic wrestler Andy Hrovat.
- The settlement will need to be approved by a court, the University of Michigan Board of Regents, and at least 98% of the claimants.
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 The gunman who held several people at a Texas synagogue over the weekend believed his hostages would be able to help arrange the release of a nearby prisoner because of their religion, survivors said. Their statements contradict an initial FBI report, which said the gunman was angered about an issue "not specifically related to the Jewish community." However, Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, who escaped Congregation Beth Israel after 10 hours on Saturday, said that the gunman "thought he could come into a synagogue, and we could get on the phone with the 'Chief Rabbi of America' and he would get what he needed." More: - The synagogue's survivors say that Malik Faisal Akram made statements insinuating that "Jews controlled the world." Akram died after the hostages escaped, though it remains unclear how.
- Jeffrey Cohen, one of the hostages, said that although Akram "did not come there to kill Jews," he thought he could use them to arrange the release of Aafia Siddiqui, who is serving a prison sentence in Fort Worth, Texas, for the attempted murder of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
- Siddiqui denied the charges and denied being connected to al-Qaida, but made frequent anti-Semitic comments at her 2010 trial, and demanded that jurors be given genetic tests to disallow the possibility of Jewish jurors.
- The hostage situation has put Jewish communities around the U.S. on edge, only a few years after the 2018 assault on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the 2019 attack at Chabad of Poway in California in 2019. The perpetrators of both attacks were motivated by white nationalism.
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GOOD NEWS: Once the omicron wave subsides, the U.S. may get a significant break from new waves, at least for a while, a number of infectious disease experts told STAT. While they cautioned that this would not mean the end of the pandemic or negate the possibility of new and more troubling variants, the experts said that the relative lack of immunologically naïve individuals would make it difficult for the virus to cause new surges. More: - The optimism is partially due to omicron's remarkable ability to infect. Given the huge wave of infections nationwide, and the estimation that up to 1% of the U.S. population is being infected every day during the wave's peak, there will be very few people who have either not been infected or vaccinated once the wave subsides.
- The expected drop in new daily cases should also prevent the virus from accumulating new mutations that could outcompete omicron.
- Much remains unknown about long-term protection from severe outcomes with both vaccination and a prior infection, though experts say it's promising that the current vaccines, which were designed to combat an earlier version of the virus, still appear protective against severe outcomes with omicron.
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 A number of international airlines canceled or changed flights on Wednesday in advance of the launch of 5G towers near airports, which could cause issues with flight instruments. Carriers like Emirates canceled flights despite a last minute announcement by AT&T and Verizon on Tuesday that they would delay the turning on of towers within two miles of runways. Some of the airlines say they were informed by the FAA or Boeing that 777s would be especially impacted by the 5G service. More: - AT&T and Verizon maintain that their towers will not interfere with aircraft equpiment.
- Similar 5G networks have been deployed in other countries without issue, though the FAA says it is concerned that the telecom giants' networks could cause disruptions, based on a frequency similarity to what is used by radio altimeters. Read more about this issue here.
- Some international airlines, like Qatar Airways, say they only expect minor delays on flights leaving the U.S. Other Qatar routes are continuing on schedule.
- Airlines have agreed to give AT&T and Verizon a list of airports where they believe the new C-Band service should remain restricted through July.
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 The New York Times has acquired footage from the drone strike that killed 10 innocent people, including seven children, in Afghanistan during the U.S. military withdrawal in August. The grainy footage shows children walking on the street moments before the area was hit by a Hellfire missile, though a Pentagon official said late last year that their presence was obvious only after the strike, and that those making the call to fire did not have "the luxury of time." The Pentagon targeted the car of Zemari Ahmadi, a worker employed by a California aid group, mistaking him for an ISIS-K member planning an attack. More: - The U.S. military was desperate to head off terrorist attacks at Kabul Airport in the days after a suicide bomber killed 182 people in the area, including 13 American soldiers.
- The newly declassified video footage was acquired by the Times through a Freedom of Information Act request.
- One of the two released videos is in color but shifts to black-and-white while Ahmadi's Toyota Corolla is targeted and detonated.
- The military maintained for a few days that the car was transporting a bomb, but later said a secondary explosion could have been caused by a propane tank. In September, the Pentagon admitted it made a "tragic mistake."
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- The Supreme Court appears poised to rule in favor of Sen. Ted Cruz and could dismiss a law limiting how much money political candidates can repay themselves from campaign contributions.
- French actor Gaspard Ulliel, who played Hannibal Lecter in "Hannibal Rising," and will soon appear in Marvel's Disney+ series "Moon Knight," has died at the age of 37 in a skiing accident.
- A strong majority of people worldwide believe that journalists, business executives, and political leaders are "purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations," according to a new survey.
- Starbucks said it will no longer require employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 following the Supreme Court's rejection of the Biden administration's employer-based vaccine mandate.
- The NFL has fined Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Bruce Arians $50,000 after he swatted Bucs safety Andrew Adams on the back of the helmet during Sunday's defeat of the Philadelphia Eagles. Arians has said he was trying to move Adams after the end of a play, after Adams had tried to pull another player out of a pile, which could draw a penalty.
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 |  | Jonathan Harris is a writer and editor who lives in Los Angeles. |  | | Editor | Eduardo Garcia is a writer and editor based in New York. He is writing an illustrated book about climate change that will be published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Scientific American, and others. In one of his previous lives, Eduardo worked as a Reuters correspondent in Latin America for nearly a decade. | |
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