◾ President Biden called on governors and local leaders to reinstate coronavirus-related mask mandates during a White House briefing Monday, before announcing several other vaccine-related directives. ◾ "I’m reiterating my call for every governor, mayor and local leader to maintain and reinstate the mask mandate," Biden said. "Please, this is not politics, reinstate the mandate if you let it down." ◾...

◾ Dredgers, excavators and tugboats work through weekend to free stern, but bow still stuck at edge ◾ Accompanied by a blaring horn and cries of “God is great”, in the early hours of Monday morning, it finally budged. ◾ An Egyptian and international salvaging team has succeeded in partially freeing a vast container ship that had become stuck on the banks of the Suez canal for six days, holding up...

📍 A year after the pandemic began, Genoveva Fernández Rodríguez, 59, a house cleaner in Chile, is still vigilantly wearing her mask, using alcohol gel and disinfecting her clothes after work. 📍 Fernández will get her first vaccine dose Thursday, but as she rides to work each day on Santiago’s metro system, she finds herself actively dodging groups of mainly young people who she feels have given up...

◾ A planned Biden administration executive order will require many software vendors to notify their federal government customers when the companies have a cybersecurity breach, according to a draft seen by Reuters. ◾ A National Security Council spokeswoman said no decision has been made on the final content of the executive order. The order could be released as early as next week. ◾ The SolarWinds...

◾ Vladimir Putin moved a step closer to becoming 'president for life' today as Russian MPs approved a law that would let him stay in power until 2036. ◾ Putin, 68, was due to be term-limited out of office in 2024 but last year won public backing to amend Russia's constitution and pave the way for two more terms. ◾ The necessary legislation has now passed the lower house of Russia's parliament and...

◾ Kellogg's Cereal Straws are coming back by popular demand after more than a decade spent off store shelves, the company announced Thursday. ◾ "Kellogg is answering superfans’ petition and social media pleas to bring back its iconic Kellogg’s Cereal Straws," Kellogg said in a release shared with USA TODAY. "After a 12-year hiatus, the nostalgia-inducing Kellogg’s Cereal Straws are revived in two...

◾ Low-Earth orbit, a narrow band of space relatively close to the Earth's surface, is crowded with thousands of tons of space debris — objects as large as defunct satellites and spent rocket parts all the way down to nuts, bolts and flecks of paint. ◾ On Saturday, a new mission is set to launch that aims to clean up some of the debris that is languishing in orbit around the planet. Known as ELSA-d,...

◾ Italy, France, Germany and several other countries will resume administering AstraZeneca jabs from Friday after Europe’s medicines regulator said the vaccine was “safe and effective” and its benefits outweighed its risks. ◾ Portugal will resume on Monday, Spain and the Netherlands next week, while Sweden’s public health agency said it would take “a few days” to decide. ◾ The European Medicines...

◾ The role of Germany, and in particular Health Minister Jens Spahn, is in the spotlight after a chaotic round of telephone diplomacy at the start of the week ended with the EU’s biggest states agreeing to put AstraZeneca on hold. ◾ Spahn says he acted on expert advice after Germany’s vaccine watchdog reported on what it described as a statistically significant number of cases of a rare brain blood...

◾ Nepalese drug regulators are reportedly investigating a gift of 2,000 Covid-19 vaccine doses brought to the country by a Bahraini sheikh who flew in to climb Mount Everest. ◾ Sheikh Mohamed Hamad Mohamed Al Khalifa arrived in Kathmandu on Monday night with 15 others including three British nationals to climb the world’s highest mountain as part of a Bahrain Defence Force. ◾ As well as mountain...