The Biden administration scored a significant victory Friday in its court battles to enforce various federal vaccine mandates, with an appeals court ruling that the government can enforce a vaccine-or-testing rule for companies with more than 100 employees.
— Read on www.cnn.com/2021/12/17/politics/appeals-court-vaccine-mandate-osha-large-employers-federal-contractors/index.html

Illegal gold mining in the north Amazonian territory of Brazil’s indigenous Munduruku people has led to more than half of several hundred people tested showing unsafe mercury levels.
— Read on www.mining.com/web/amazon-tribe-suffers-mercury-contamination-as-illegal-mining-spreads/

What kinds of tests are available?

A handful of rapid antigen tests are available without a prescription, including the Abbott BinaxNOW, the Ellume Covid-19 Home Test and the Quidel QuickVue At-Home Covid-19 Test. Prices start at about $7 per test, although President Biden has announced plans to reduce prices by roughly one-third.

All three detect small viral proteins, called antigens. The tests require rubbing a shallow nasal swab inside your nostrils and then exposing the swab to a few drops of chemicals. They provide results in about 15 minutes.

The tests themselves are fairly straightforward, but each one involves a slightly different procedure, which should be followed to the letter. “If you’re doing at-home tests, you must read the instructions and follow them meticulously,” said Dr. Patrick Godbey, a former president of the College of American Pathologists.

Since Ancient Egypt, 3,000 years before Christ, pigeons are used as messengers. They have this use because they always know how to return home: just raise them in a specific place and these birds will know how to return there, starting from any point. Roman general Julius Caesar used racing pigeons in his military efforts against the Gauls. They also took messages in Persia, Ancient Greece, in the financial market – in 1860, Englishman Paul Reuter, founder of the Reuters news agency, used racing pigeons to send stock quotes between Brussels, Belgium, and Aachen, Germany. We have a long history with these animals. But only recently have we started to understand why they can orient themselves so well: using the planet’s magnetic field as GPS .Source: Magnetoreception: the sixth sense – Magic Mistura を

A Florida man who hurled a fire extinguisher at police officers during some of the most ferocious fighting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was sentenced on Friday to more than five years in prison, the longest term handed down so far to any of the more than 700 people charged in the attack.

The defendant, Robert Palmer, made his way to the Capitol that day in a distinctive red-white-and-blue flag-styled jacket after listening to President Donald J. Trump address a huge crowd at the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House. Prosecutors say he milled about in the crowd outside the building as violence increasingly broke out between the police and rioters.

By a little before 5 p.m., Mr. Palmer found himself amid the most severe fighting at the lower west terrace, where an almost medieval form of hand-to-hand combat had erupted. There, prosecutors say, he threw a wooden plank-like spear at the police, sprayed a fire extinguisher at officers and then hurled the empty canister at them.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to more firmly embrace the test-to-stay approach, already used in many school districts, after research of such policies in the Chicago and Los Angeles areas found coronavirus infections did not increase when using the strategy. Test-to-stay means that students exposed to the infection can remain in school as long as they remain free of symptoms and testing shows negative results. Source: CDC endorses policy to avoid school COVID-19 quarantines – Los Angeles Times