Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Andrew Cuomo’s Downfall Began with a Book Deal - A new report details how the former New York governor forced aides to work on his lucrative pandemic memoir, and how that scandal connects to the others that brought him down. - link

• Why Russia Hasn’t Cracked Down on COVID-19 - The country’s fragile political climate has repeatedly undermined its response to the pandemic. - link

• Reëxamining the Legacy of Race and Robert E. Lee - The historian Allen C. Guelzo believes that the Confederate general deserves a more compassionate reading. - link

• Trapped in the “House of Gucci” - There are times when the movie becomes a kind of actors’ contest, with the stars lining up to salt the ham. - link

• The Best Music of 2021 - I found myself pulled toward albums that were elemental, tender, free. - link

From Vox

• Congress is facing a December time crunch. Here’s what to expect. -

  

  Congress is running out of time to avoid a shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.

  With the Thanksgiving holiday in the rearview mirror, Congress is once again facing a time crunch to accomplish a number of major legislative priorities before the end of the year.

  After punting the decisions earlier in the year, lawmakers need to both fund the government past the current December 3 deadline and raise the debt ceiling before the US defaults on its debt.

  Senate Democrats also hope to advance President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion reconciliation bill, the Build Back Better Act, after it passed the House in mid-November, and the chamber also needs to make headway on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), an annual must-pass defense policy bill.

  The NDAA, which is historically bipartisan, may be relatively smooth sailing — albeit time-consuming — after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed this month to decouple it from the US Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), but Build Back Better faces an uncertain fate at the hands of moderate Senate Democrats.

  In its current form, the bill includes lower prescription drug prices, universal pre-kindergarten, an expanded child tax credit, and four weeks of paid family leave, but could still change substantially prior to any final passage.

  Short-term extensions for government funding and the debt ceiling, meanwhile, received bipartisan support this fall, but it’s still unclear whether lawmakers can coalesce behind an omnibus spending bill before the December 3 deadline, and Republicans have already signaled they may not support another increase to the debt ceiling, despite the potentially severe consequences of a US default.

  “Now it’s our turn and we’ve got to buckle down,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin told NPR this month. “And we have several things that are critical: military authorization, debt ceiling, continuing resolution. It’s going to be a busy December, but we’ve got to get the job done.”

  Here’s everything Congress must get done before December 25, why it’s so important — and why so much of it is still in limbo.

  Congress must fund the government to avoid a shutdown

  At the top of Congress’s to-do list is to make sure, one way or another, that the lights stay on past December 3. Congress passed a continuing resolution on September 30 to fund the government through that date and avoid a shutdown, but it’s set to expire on Friday, and it’s looking increasingly unlikely that lawmakers will successfully advance an omnibus spending bill before then.

  A likely alternative, according to CQ Roll Call, is another CR, which could fund the government through February or March and give Congress more time to finalize its 2022 appropriations bill.

  Lawmakers could also opt for a stopgap measure funding the government until just December 17, in hopes that the tight schedule will force Congress to come to an agreement about the full appropriations bill, or at least give them some time to make progress on it before passing another stopgap measure to fund the government into next year.

  A complete omnibus bill includes a dozen smaller spending measures to fund various aspects of the federal government; currently, 10 of those component bills have passed the House, while the Senate has brought just three bills to committee and passed none.

  Whatever path they take, Congress will have to get straight to work when members return from the Thanksgiving break; starting Monday, they only have five days to avert a shutdown.

  Can Congress pay its debts?

  Next on the docket, and no less important, is raising the debt ceiling. According to a November 16 letter from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to congressional leaders, the government could reach the debt ceiling by December 15, at which point, she wrote, “there are scenarios in which Treasury would be left with insufficient remaining resources to continue to finance the operations of the U.S. government beyond this date.”

  In October, Congress voted to increase the debt limit by $480 billion, which gave the Treasury enough funds to keep the government solvent — for a while.

  But now, with the December 15 deadline fast approaching, it’s unclear whether Republicans will play ball with Democrats to avoid potentially catastrophic consequences.

  In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in September, Yellen warned of a dire situation should Congress fail to act and increase the debt limit.

  “In a matter of days, millions of Americans could be strapped for cash,” she wrote. “We could see indefinite delays in critical payments. Nearly 50 million seniors could stop receiving Social Security checks for a time. Troops could go unpaid. Millions of families who rely on the monthly child tax credit could see delays. America, in short, would default on its obligations.”

  The US has never defaulted on its debt, although it has come close, and economists say that to do so would have catastrophic consequences, including potentially reversing the progress of recovery from the pandemic, slashing millions of jobs, increasing borrowing costs for ordinary Americans, and throwing the global economy into turmoil.

  Despite that, Republicans hope to force Democrats to raise the debt ceiling without their cooperation — “in order to simply make a point,” as Vox’s Li Zhou wrote back in October.

  Democrats, on the other hand, have argued that Republicans ought to work with them to pass a suspension or increase, or simply get out of the way. One, because avoiding a gigantic economic collapse is in everyone’s interest, and the minority party hasn’t typically blocked action to this degree in the past. And two, because both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for the actual debt that this legislation would address.

  According to the Hill, it’s possible Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will once again reach a deal to raise or suspend the debt ceiling, despite opposition from members of McConnell’s conference.

  That’s not a sure thing, however, and it’s not clear how Democrats intend to navigate the debt ceiling issue. One option, floated by Pelosi and previously backed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), would be to use the reconciliation process. Reconciliation would allow Democrats to lift the debt ceiling without any Republican votes; however, Democrats would also have to put forward a specific figure to which they plan to raise the ceiling, which is a potentially unpopular solution before the midterm elections, and one which would require the input of Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, according to CQ Roll Call.

  “We cannot let the full faith and credit of the United States lapse, and we are focusing on getting this done in a bipartisan way,” Schumer told reporters last Sunday.

  Biden’s agenda hangs in the balance

  Also on the agenda is the Build Back Better Act, which is once again in the hands of the Senate after passing the House on November 19. Although the flagship climate and social spending bill is less time-sensitive than the previous two priorities Congress is faced with, Democratic senators have said they hope to pass the bill before going on break for the holiday recess.

  Sen. Amy Klobuchar tells @GStephanopoulos that she’s confident the Build Back Better plan will be completed by Christmas.
  
  “Sen. Manchin is still at the negotiating table.” https://t.co/srgZHCQ5im pic.twitter.com/30Oe1tr7g9

  — This Week (@ThisWeekABC) November 28, 2021

Though it included $3.5 trillion in spending when it was introduced earlier this year, the bill has been pared down to about $1.75 trillion by moderates in both chambers — and especially by Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who retain outsized influence over the bill since the budget reconciliation process requires all 50 Democratic votes (and Vice President Kamala Harris to break the tie) to pass an evenly divided Senate. No Senate Republicans are expected to vote in favor of the bill.

Despite being scaled back, the version of the bill that passed the House includes a number of flagship items from the Biden agenda, such as provisions for universal pre-kindergarten, an extension of the child tax credit, $555 billion in climate spending, and a new corporate minimum tax rate.

More controversial among Democrats, the measure also includes a temporary increase to the amount of state and local taxes Americans can deduct from their federal tax filings (called the SALT deduction), though it’s not certain that will survive the Senate.

While it’s not essential that the bill pass before the holiday recess, it’s still a top priority for Democrats, for a number of reasons — both in order to cement Biden’s domestic policy legacy and, potentially, to help boost his sagging poll numbers as inflation raises prices on everything from groceries to fuel.

However, the bill isn’t likely to make it through the Senate without some changes.

Among those possible changes: While the House version includes $200 billion for paid family leave and a provision for Medicaid to cover hearing costs, Manchin has stood firmly against both proposals. The Senate parliamentarian also has final say on a number of elements in the bill that may not conform with the rules of reconciliation, including immigration policy, and any changes will have to go back to the House for final approval after passing the Senate.

The NDAA is coming down to the wire

The NDAA, an annual defense policy bill, has passed Congress every year for the past six decades, including over a veto from former President Donald Trump, which Congress overrode by a wide margin.

This year, the bill is facing a relatively straightforward path — there are no veto threats on the horizon, for one — but Congress still needs to get back on track after a snag regarding Schumer’s attempt to link the NDAA with a bill to counter China’s technological and defense gains.

That bill — the US Innovation and Competition Act, or USICA — passed the House earlier this year and would provide $250 billion in funding for research and development, as well as “to boost the U.S. semiconductor industry,” according to Politico.

Its inclusion with the NDAA proved controversial, however, and the two measures were unlinked earlier this month ahead of a successful procedural vote in the Senate to advance the NDAA process.

That vote ended several months of stalling after the Senate Armed Services Committee approved a version of the bill more than three months ago, and after the House passed its version in September.

But while the ball is now rolling on the NDAA, major policy debates remain before it reaches Biden’s desk: A number of proposed inclusions could have a big impact on US defense policy going forward.

Among those changes is a version of the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act backed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), which would take prosecution of military sex crimes out of the chain of command, and a provision that would include women in the draft for the first time.

All told, there are also more than 1,000 amendments filed, including one to repeal the 1991 Gulf War and 2002 Iraq War authorizations.

Although that measure has fairly broad support, McConnell warned that repealing the 2002 authorization would give the US less latitude to act in the Middle East.

“I expect a robust debate about that,” McConnell told Politico earlier this month.

• It’s time to stop demonizing “invasive” species -

  

  Climate change is forcing some animals to move. Don’t call them “invasives.”

  Marine ecologist Piper Wallingford was doing fieldwork on the rocky shore of Laguna Beach, California, in 2016 when she noticed a dime-sized creature she’d never seen before. It was a dark unicorn snail, a predator that drills into mussels and injects an enzyme that liquefies their flesh. “Then,” Wallingford explains, “they basically suck it out like soup.”

  The animal is native to the Mexican state of Baja California, Wallingford later learned, and it’s been migrating up the coast over the last few decades in search of new habitat, eating into local mussel populations along the way. It’s also one of countless species around the world — from white-tailed deer to lobsters to armadillos to maple trees — that are moving with the climate.

  Ecologists expect climate change to create mass alterations in the habitats of these “range-shifting” or “climate-tracking” species, as they’re sometimes called, which will reshuffle ecosystems in ways that are hard to predict. The migrations are critical to species’ ability to survive hotter temperatures.

  The scientific community largely views this kind of habitat shift as a good thing, Wallingford and other ecologists told Vox. But the primary lens available to the general public and to policymakers is less forgiving. “Invasive species” is a concept so ingrained in American consciousness that it’s taken on a life of its own, coloring the way we judge the health of ecosystems and neatly dividing life on Earth into native and invasive.

  A 2018 Orange County Register story on Wallingford’s work, for example, called the dark unicorn snails “climate invaders.” “I think any time you introduce this idea of a new species, there’s sort of this inherent reaction of, ‘Oh, that’s bad, right?’” Wallingford says. But she encouraged local stakeholders not to try to remove them.

  For decades, invasion has been a defining paradigm in environmental policy, determining what gets done with limited conservation budgets. Species deemed invasive have often been killed in gruesome ways. Even though invasion biologists readily point out that many non-native species never become problematic, the invasion concept almost by definition makes scientists skeptical of species moving around. But a growing community of scientists and environmental philosophers now question whether a concept defined by a species’ geographic origin can capture the ethical and ecological complexities of life on a rapidly changing planet. In the 21st century, there’s no such thing as an undisrupted ecosystem, and this will only become truer as climate change and habitat loss accelerate. It’s crucial that we get this right.

  Range shifts have “been a real problem for the hardcore invasion biologists to deal with,” says Mark Davis, a biology professor at Macalester College and a critic of the invasion framework.

  In a controversial recent paper published in Nature Climate Change, Wallingford and a team of co-authors argued that the tools of invasion biology — for example, looking at a species’ impact on local food or water sources, or figuring out if it’s encountering prey that aren’t used to predators — could be adjusted to understand the impacts of range-shifters.

  The proposal got “a lot of pushback,” says Wallingford, who doesn’t necessarily oppose the “invasion” lens. Detractors said that merely linking climate-tracking species with invaders taints them by association. Range-shifters ought to be seen “not as invasive species to keep out, but rather as the refugees of climate change that need our assistance,” University of Connecticut ecologist Mark Urban argued in a comment published in the same journal issue.

  Climate change and the range shifts it’s causing are extraordinary circumstances. If a species flees a habitat that is burning or melting, is it ever fair to call it invasive? Even outside of a climate context, this tension reflects a more fundamental problem within the invasive species paradigm. If the label is so stigmatizing that the only appropriate response feels like extermination, perhaps something else needs to take its place.

  The origins of “invasive” species

  “Invasive species” might feel like a firmly established scientific category, but invasion biology, which studies the impacts of non-native species, is a relatively young field.

  British ecologist Charles Elton drew attention to non-native species in his 1958 book The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants, arguing that there is a place, or niche, for every species on the planet where they’ve evolved to survive. Those that move, he believed, should be removed.

  Even before that, “There were people who recognized invasions and remarked in great detail on them,” including Charles Darwin, says University of Tennessee ecologist Daniel Simberloff, one of the originators of invasion biology. It wasn’t until the 1980s, Simberloff says, that it cohered into a subfield of scientists talking to each other and looking at invasions as a general phenomenon.

  Invasion biologists aren’t opposed to the presence of all non-native species — many of them are innocuous, some are even beneficial. A widely accepted rule of thumb says that about 10 percent of species introduced into new ecosystems will survive, and about 10 percent of those (so, just 1 percent of all non-natives) will cause problems that lead them to become “invasive.” Some can do real harm, such as threatening vulnerable endemic species. Feral cats in Australia, for example, are thought to be a major driver of extinctions of small mammals.

  Invasion biology became entangled with politics as its influence grew. In 1999, then-US President Bill Clinton signed an executive order establishing the National Invasive Species Council. It defined an invasive species as a non-native species “whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” Simberloff, who advised in drafting the order, says the White House added the “economic” component to that definition — which often amounts to harming agribusiness. “There are introduced species that have some substantial impact on some agricultural crops that don’t really have much of an impact on anything else,” he says. “Many scientists wouldn’t worry about them.”

  Combining commercial and environmental concerns in the “invasive” category can make it sound as though threats to the bottom line of a business are tantamount to an ecological problem. This is particularly troublesome considering some businesses — industrial monocropping or cattle farming, for example — that are protected against invasive species by federal and state management programs are themselves hugely harmful to biodiversity. Scientists on both sides of the invasive species debate agree this conflation is problematic.

  Common starlings, for example, a species of bird native to Europe and parts of Asia and Africa, have become wildly successful as an introduced species in North America. They’re blamed for hundreds of millions of dollars in agricultural damage annually in the US, often eating grains in cattle feedlots, says Natalie Hofmeister, a PhD candidate in ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. “That’s like a treasure for the starlings,” she says. The USDA Wildlife Services poisoned 790,000 of the birds in fiscal year 2020. While starlings have long been thought to harm native bird species, which might sound like a more scientific rationale for killing them, Hofmeister says the literature isn’t settled on whether that is true.

  Stan Tekiela Author/Naturalist/Wildlife Photographer via Getty Images

  The invasion model has a nativist bias

  Some conceptions of invasive species’ harms are questionable.

  For example, invasives can be considered a threat not only by killing or outcompeting native species but also by mating with them. To protect the “genetic integrity” of species, conservationists often go to extraordinary lengths to prevent animals from hybridizing, environmental writer Emma Marris points out in her book Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World. Consider the effort in North Carolina to prevent coyotes from breeding with endangered red wolves, which bears uncomfortable parallels to Western preoccupations with racial purity that only recently went out of fashion.

  That’s why some scientists look askance at the influence of invasion biology and argue that the field has a baked-in, nativist bias on documenting negative consequences of introduced species and preserving nature as it is. Invasion biology is like epidemiology, the study of disease spread, biologists Matthew Chew and Scott Carroll wrote in a widely read opinion piece a decade ago, in that it is “a discipline explicitly devoted to destroying that which it studies.”

  Historically, the term has erroneously expanded to the idea of, “‘If you’re not from here, then you are most likely going to be invasive,’” Sonia Shah, author of The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, said on a June 2021 episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s science-mysteries podcast. Conservation policies have been crafted around the idea that if something is not from “here” — however we define that — “then it is likely to become invasive, and therefore we should repel it even before it causes any actual damage,” as Shah says, which is part of the nativist bent that pervades ecological management.

  What’s more, the very notion of “invasion” draws on a war metaphor, and media narratives about non-native species are remarkably similar to those describing enemy armies or immigrants. For example, a recent news story in the Guardian about armadillos “besieging” North Carolina described them as “pests” and “freakish.” It also gawked at the animal’s “booming reproduction rate,” an allegation that, not coincidentally, is leveled against human migrants.

  Many scholars have explored how anxieties about humans and nonhumans crossing borders, or going places where they don’t “belong,” map onto one another. “The fear of immigration is never isolated to humans,” writes science studies scholar Banu Subramaniam in The Ethics and Rhetoric of Invasion Ecology. “It includes nonhuman migrants in the form of unwanted germs, insects, plants, and animals.”

  A “curse word” that harms entire species

  One important set of interests isn’t considered in invasive species management at all: those of the “invasives” themselves. Arian Wallach, an ecologist at the University of Technology Sydney who is well known for her criticism of invasion biology, calls invasive species “nothing less and nothing more than a curse word” used to demonize species and exclude them from moral consideration. She first began to question invasion biology after she moved for her PhD to Australia, which has some of the most militant invasive species management programs in the world, aimed at protecting the country’s own unique species.

  “I started seeing conservationists blowing up animals with bombs, shooting them from helicopters, poisoning them, spreading diseases through them,” she says. Australia has shot feral goats, camels, deer, pigs, and other animals from the sky (a method also used in the US), and the country kills many small mammals with 1080, a poison that is widely regarded as causing an extremely painful death. Invasion biology, Wallach believes, is “a bad idea that’s had its run.”

  Julie Fletcher/Getty Images

  Wallach’s own research looks at how dingoes, dog-like animals that are thought to have been brought to the continent thousands of years ago, can control the populations of more recently introduced cats and foxes that eat some of Australia’s iconic marsupial species, such as the eastern barred bandicoot. Her work serves as a proof of concept for “compassionate conservation,” a movement that opposes the mass killing of some animals in an attempt to save others. A core tenet of this framework is to value animals as individuals with their own moral value, rather than just a member of a species.

  It might seem, then, that there’s a trade-off between caring about animals as individuals and caring about them in the context of species and ecosystems, but Wallach argues it’s more complicated. Bias against non-natives doesn’t just harm individuals; it can harm entire species.

  In a 2019 study, Wallach and a team of researchers pointed out that non-native species are excluded from world conservation goals. This creates situations where, for example, a species like the hog deer, a small deer native to South Asia, is endangered in its home range but hunted and treated as feral in Australia. Using a sample of 134 animals introduced into and out of Australia, the team found that formal conservation counts significantly underestimated their ranges, and that 15 of them could be downgraded from “threatened” or “near threatened” status if their non-native ranges were counted. For many endangered species, non-native habitats can be part of the solution, providing refuge to wildlife that can no longer survive in their native ranges.

  A broader movement wants to see beyond the invasion lens

  If we try to think outside the invasive species framework, what else can we look to?

  Indigenous knowledge is increasingly being recognized as essential to conservation, write Nicholas Reo and Laura Ogden — Dartmouth University professors of Indigenous environmental studies and anthropology, respectively — in an ethnographic study of Anishinaabe perspectives on invasive species. (The Anishinaabe are a group of culturally related First Nations peoples in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the US.) Anishinaabe ideas, Reo and Ogden found, reflect a worldview that sees animals and plants as belonging to nations with their own purposes and believes people have the responsibility to find the reason for a species’ migration. The authors’ sources recognized parallels between the extermination of species deemed invasive and the dark history of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples. The interviews “helped me recognize the ways in which different philosophies of the world shape our ethical response to change,” Ogden says.

  Life is “extremely adaptable and regenerative and dynamic,” Wallach says. “Go back 10,000 years, and it’s a completely different world. Twenty thousand years, it’s different. A million, 2 million, 500 million … There is no point that things aren’t shifting and moving.”

  Another scientific idea that captures this notion is “novel ecosystems,” or, as environmental journalist Fred Pearce has termed it, “the new wild”: ecosystems that have arisen, intentionally or not, via human introduction.

  Wildnerdpix/iStockphoto via Getty Images

In Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of Chile and Argentina, a particularly dramatic novel ecosystem is taking shape. In 1946, beavers were introduced there in a futile attempt to create a fur industry. Instead, the animals proliferated and munched down the region’s Nothofagus — southern beech — forests, creating dams and ponds. “They are these miraculous world builders,” says Ogden, who wrote an essay imagining the beavers not as invaders, but as a diaspora. (Beavers have also been a boon for ducks and other marine species.) The invasive species paradigm, Ogden adds, is devoid of nuance, history, and politics; she prefers a concept that gives expression to the moral complexity of the beavers’ presence in South America, as well as the fact that they had no choice in being moved there.

The beavers should ultimately be removed from the forested areas, Ogden believes, though she doesn’t think we can do so with a clear conscience, and says eradication “seems very unlikely.” But the idea of a diaspora opens up a way of thinking about what we owe the beavers, as opposed to how to expel them. After 75 years in South America, don’t the animals have a claim to living there? What right do we have to exterminate them?

I posed this question to Daniel Simberloff, the prominent invasion biologist. “I don’t believe they’re endangering any of the Nothofagus species,” he acknowledged, noting that there hasn’t been enough study to know what impact the beavers are having on species that require the southern beech forest habitat. Still, “I think it’s a disaster that this native ecosystem is being destroyed and replaced by pastures of introduced plants,” Simberloff says. “Other people may not agree with me.”

Even when it’s packaged as objective science, conservation always entails value judgments. One might say that the deaths of 100,000 beavers should count as a “disaster” just as much as the demise of an old-growth forest. Conservationists will have to choose whether to meet ecosystem disruptions like this one with the “war machine” of invasion biology, as Ogden calls it, or to come to terms with a changing world.

For now, the dark unicorn, the thumbnail-sized snail that caught marine ecologist Piper Wallingford’s eye, continues inching up the coast of California. “The question of how they’re getting from one site to another is still one that we can’t answer,” Wallingford says.

There is something humbling in seeing other species’ will to survive in an interconnected world undone by climate change. Though the dark unicorns’ movements elude our understanding, they already know where they need to go.

• What you need to know about the omicron variant -

  

  Omicron is the newest Covid-19 “variant of concern,” according to the World Health Organization.

  A new Covid-19 variant, now named the omicron variant, was detected in South Africa on Wednesday, prompting renewed concern about the pandemic, a major stock market drop, and the imposition of new international travel restrictions to stop the spread.

  Though the variant’s existence was first reported by South Africa, it has also been found in Belgium, Botswana, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, and the United Kingdom, meaning the variant has already spread — though how far is unclear, as new cases continue cropping up around the world.

  While it will take scientists some weeks to understand the omicron variant, including how quickly it can spread and what the illness from infection with the variant looks like, the World Health Organization has already labeled omicron a “variant of concern,” which means it could be more transmissible, more virulent, or more able to evade the protection granted by vaccines than the original strain of Covid-19.

  More information about the new variant is sure to emerge over the coming days and weeks, but here’s what experts are saying so far.

  What do we know about the new variant?

  Early evidence suggests that the omicron variant is highly contagious, possibly more so than the delta variant. With more than 30 mutations on the spike protein — the part of the virus that binds to a human cell, infecting it — omicron could both be more transmissible and have more mechanisms to evade immunity already conferred by vaccines or prior infection.

“The mutations would strongly suggest that it would be more transmissible and that it might evade some of the protection of monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma, and perhaps even antibodies that are induced by vaccine,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.

As Fauci emphasized, however, the vaccines still work, and they are still the best way to protect yourself from the virus.

“I don’t think there’s any possibility that [the omicron variant] could completely evade any protection by vaccine,” Fauci said. “It may diminish it a bit, but that’s the reason why you boost.”

So far, cases of the variant have appeared primarily in young people, leaving them exhausted and with body aches and soreness, according to Dr. Angelique Coetzee, head of the South African Medical Association. “We’re not talking about patients that might go straight to a hospital and be admitted,” she told the BBC.

Compared to its pandemic peak, cases in South Africa are relatively low right now. However, the country has still seen a substantial spike in new infections: On Friday, South Africa reported 2,828 new Covid-19 cases, according to the Associated Press, with as many as 90 percent of those cases potentially caused by the omicron variant.

Reinfection is also a concern with the new variant, according to the journal Nature, but at this early stage, it’s difficult to tell how likely reinfection or breakthrough infections actually are.

“The mutation profile gives us concern, but now we need to do the work to understand the significance of this variant and what it means for the response to the pandemic,” Dr. Richard Lessells, an infectious disease expert at University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, said at a South African health ministry press conference on Thursday.

Whether the efficacy of treatments such as monoclonal antibodies — and new pill treatments from Pfizer and Merck — will be the same against the omicron variant is also unclear, as is the new variant’s virulence, or how sick it will make those infected, Dr. Leana Wen, a professor of health policy at George Washington University, told CNN’s Jim Acosta on Friday.

According to the WHO, the earliest known case of the omicron variant was on November 9, and the mutation was first detected November 24 in South Africa, which has an advanced detection system. While the delta variant is still the dominant strain worldwide and currently accounts for 99.9 percent of cases in the US, the discovery of the omicron variant has coincided with a spike in South African cases — a more than 1,400 percent increase over the past two weeks, according to the New York Times.

However, the variant has likely spread far more widely than South Africa, according to Fauci. “When you have a virus that’s showing this degree of transmissibility & you’re having travel-related cases … it almost invariably is going to go all over,” NBC reporter Kaitlan Collins tweeted Saturday, quoting Fauci.

What are governments doing to contain the new variant?

On Friday, President Joe Biden announced new travel restrictions on eight southern African countries, which will take effect on Monday. Travel from Lesotho, South Africa, Eswatini, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, and Botswana will be restricted, though those restrictions won’t apply to US citizens or green card holders, among other groups.

As Wen said on Friday, travel bans don’t necessarily do much overall to prevent the spread of the virus, but they can buy time for governments to learn more about diseases and variants and better protect their populations.

“I’ve decided that we’re going to be cautious,” Biden told reporters on Friday. “But we don’t know a lot about the variant except that it is of great concern; it seems to spread rapidly.”

Other nations — including the UK, Australia, Israel, France, and Germany — are also restricting travel from southern African nations in an effort to contain the new variant, despite criticism from the South African government.

“This latest round of travel bans is akin to punishing South Africa for its advanced genomic sequencing and the ability to detect new variants quicker,” South Africa’s foreign ministry said in a Saturday statement. “Excellent science should be applauded and not punished.”

As of Saturday the US has not imposed any new travel restrictions on the European or Asian nations where the omicron variant has appeared.

In addition to imminent travel restrictions on a number of southern African nations, Biden urged vaccination and boosters for US citizens as a response to the new variant.

To that end, Biden on Friday also called on wealthy countries with the capability to donate vaccines to do so to low- and middle-income countries, as well as to waive intellectual property rights on current vaccines and treatments so that poorer countries can produce generic versions.

Accessibility isn’t the only issue when it comes to a global vaccination campaign, however. Vaccine hesitancy has proven to be a global problem, including in South Africa, where last week the government asked drug companies to delay delivery of new vaccine doses in response to declining demand, despite less than 30 percent of its adult population being inoculated. Europe is presently struggling with a new outbreak at least partly due to its uneven vaccine uptake and vaccine resistance.

How concerned should I be?

Omicron is likely already in the US, given the loosened restrictions on international travel earlier in the month and that the variant dates at least as far back as November 9. And even if it’s not yet, it soon will be, experts say.

“It’s not going to be possible to keep this infection out of the country,” Fauci told the New York Times. “The question is: Can you slow it down?”

While there are still many unknowns about the omicron variant, experts agree that it’s a troubling development in the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We’ve seen variants come and go, and every month or two we hear about one,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told PBS on Friday. “This one is concerning. This one is different. There are a lot of features here that have me and many of us concerned about this.”

Delta, the current dominant strain of the virus, shows heightened transmissibility and an ability to evade antibodies, as Vox’s Umair Irfan explained in June. But as with delta, the key to limiting omicron’s spread depends upon human behavior and people’s willingness to engage with proven public health responses.

Stopping the spread also means stopping the possibility of harmful mutations to the virus. Mutations — changes to the makeup of the virus — are bound to happen, and many of them are harmless to people. The more opportunities the virus has to spread, however, the more chance it has to mutate into a variation that spreads faster, is more resistant to antibodies and treatments, or creates worse health outcomes — or even all of these negative traits.

Existing tools, however, should still be effective in stopping omicron — PCR tests appear to detect the variant, according to the WHO, and Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told NPR on Friday that “there is no data at the present time to indicate that the current vaccines would not work [against omicron].”

Additionally, masking and social distancing both are proven strategies to stop the spread of Covid-19, as are getting vaccinated and getting a booster shot.

Those steps are especially crucial as the holiday season and cold weather bring people together indoors, where transmission occurs. According to the New York Times’s Covid-19 tracker, cases in the US have increased 10 percent over the past two weeks, with daily averages of new cases over 85,000, hospitalizations over 52,000, and about 1,000 deaths each day. As of November 24, almost 75 percent of vaccine-eligible Americans have received at least one vaccine dose.

From The Hindu: Sports

• ‘Forza Horizon 5’ review: The best-looking game of 2021 with stunning graphics and sceneries - The latest edition in the racing Forza Horizon game series is near-perfect and is miles ahead of other driving games

• Ind vs NZ 1st Test, Day 5 | Rachin Ravindra, Ajaz Patel deny India a win - New Zealand was 165 for nine when the stumps were called after an engrossing fifth and final day at the Green Park

• Satwik-Chirag pair qualifies for BWF World Tour Finals - Satwik and Chirag had finished at the semifinals of the Indonesia Open last week but made the cut after Japanese pairing of Akira Koga and Taichi Saito also lost in the last four at the Super 1000 tournament

• ‘Happy where we are now’ - Have real spin power, we can get the job done: Shreyas

• Challenger | Sneh, Taniya, Shikha and Pooja to lead squads - The BCCI has announced the squads for the senior women’s Challenger Trophy to be played at Vijayawada from December 4 to 9.The squads: India-A: Sneh R

From The Hindu: National News

• No COVID-19 lockdown proposal yet: Karnataka CM - Asked people not to panic about ‘Omicron’ but duly follow all COVID-19 protocol

• Omicron risks spark calls for booster doses - Experts divided on extra protection for few over ensuring universal immunisation

• Nearly 42 students, one teacher-test COVID-19 positive - All of them kept in isolation.

• Nair Service Society rejects offer by Kerala State Commission for Economically Backward Classes among Forward Communities to carry out latter’s socio-economic survey - Responding to an offer made by commission chairman M. R. Hariharan Nair that the panel shall also consider the data generated by the NSS for finalising its recommendations, NSS general secretary G. Sukumaran Nair says the organisation would not cooperate with the “unscientific survey and collection of data”

• ED questioning former T.N. Minister - Allegation that gold worth crores was purchased using black money

From BBC: Europe

• Covid: Dutch police arrest quarantine hotel escapees - Police say the arrests were made on a plane in Amsterdam’s airport before take-off to Spain on Sunday.

• Covid: 13 test positive for Omicron after S Africa-Netherlands flights - Thirteen people who travelled from South Africa to the Netherlands have tested positive for Omicron.

• Channel migrants: France wants ‘serious’ talks with UK - Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin says France will not be held hostage by domestic British politics.

• Channel disaster: A father’s anguish over missing family since tragedy - Rizgar Hussein has not spoken to his family since they boarded a boat across the Channel on Tuesday.

• Calais activists: Migrants call us from boats asking for help - Activists in Calais demand change after decades of people coming to the city looking to reach the UK.

From Ars Technica

• All the best Cyber Monday 2021 deals we can find so far - We’re sifting through the Cyber Monday junk to find the deals that are actually deals. - link

• All the best Cyber Monday 2021 video game deals we can find, in one place - A whole lot of Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC games of note are still on sale. - link

• The ancient origins of glass - Glass’s rich history is being traced using modern archaeology and materials science. - link

• We transformed a London borough into a game to get fewer people traveling by car - Here’s what happened. - link

• How Foundation preserved Asimov’s big ideas while bringing the story to vivid life - Ars chats with showrunner David S. Goyer and science advisor Kevin Hand - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• My girlfriend has an onlyfans account and it’s doing really well -

  I just have to figure out how to break the news to her

  submitted by /u/ihateshitcoins2
  [link] [comments]

• My niece told me this joke: What’s the difference between Chanukah and a dragon? -

  Chanukah is always eight nights.

  A dragon sometimes ate knights.

  submitted by /u/EtOHMartini
  [link] [comments]

• TIL: A Welshman Invented the Condom when he Discovered he Could Wrap his Penis in Sheep Intestines to Prevent Pregnancy -

  A hundred years later a Scotsman perfected the idea by taking them out of the sheep first.

  submitted by /u/SillyCubensis
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• How do you say “No TV” in Russia? -

  Nietflix

  submitted by /u/BenderDeLorean
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• A serial masturbator goes to the doctor. -

  Doctor tells him, “You’ve got to stop masturbating.”

  Man asks, “Why?”

  Doctor says, “So that I can examine you.”

  submitted by /u/HPCTRTW
  [link] [comments]