Author: easyfilo

Enlarge (credit: OSHA)

On Tuesday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced it was withdrawing its planned vaccine mandate for businesses with 100 or more employees. The decision comes in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that blocked OSHA from implementing the mandate while lawsuits opposing it made their way through lower courts.

But the agency also indicated it as still working on getting the mandate implemented via a completely different, albeit slower, mechanism.

OSHA’s initial attempt to implement a vaccine mandate was done under a clause of US law that allows the agency to issue temporary emergency standards in response to “new hazards.” Reasoning that SARS-CoV-2 represents a new hazard, the emergency standard would require vaccination or testing, and apply to companies with 100 or more employees, provided those employees were not consistently working outdoors.

Enlarge / Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Yes, the colon comes after the “Jedi.” (credit: EA)

EA and Lucasfilm Games have jointly announced that three new Star Wars games are in development at Respawn, the studio that developed Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

Among those three planned games is a sequel to Fallen Order, which was a story-driven, Souls-like melee combat action and exploration game. The other two games include a first-person shooter and a strategy game, but EA’s press release did not provide details about those titles beyond their respective genres.

The first-person shooter will be led by a former producer for the Star Wars: Battlefront franchise of online shooters set in the Star Wars universe. The strategy game will be produced by Respawn, but its lead developer will be Bit Reactor. Bit Reactor is a new studio formed in part by developers who previously worked on the recent entries in the XCOM franchise.

Enlarge / World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (credit: Getty | Fabrice Cof)

The head of the World Health Organization on Monday dampened optimism that the pandemic will subside in omicron’s wake, noting that global conditions are still ideal for the emergence of new variants.

“There are different scenarios for how the pandemic could play out and how the acute phase could end,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a WHO executive board meeting Monday. “But it is dangerous to assume that omicron will be the last variant or that we are in the endgame. On the contrary, globally, the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge.”

Many US experts and officials have expressed cautious hope that the towering omicron wave could signal the final throes of the pandemic. In this beatific vision, the country will see a lull in transmission after COVID-19 cases peak and decline. With at least 15.8 million people infected just since the start of this year, the ultratransmissible variant is significantly boosting collective immunity across the US, which already has 63 percent of the population fully vaccinated.