Delta Air Lines is ditching a vaccine mandate for employees, according to company CEO Ed Bastian, who notably emphasized the "divisiveness" of such an order.

Bastian said announcing a plan to get all employees vaccinated, without enforcing a mandate, has worked, allowing the company to reach a 90% vaccination rate. The CEO, according to Fox Business, said:

"The reason the mandate was put in by [the] president, I believe, was because they wanted to make sure companies had a plan to get their employees vaccinated. A month before the president came out with the mandate, we had already announced our plan to get all of our people vaccinated. And the good news is the plan is working.

"I acknowledged that there will need to be religious and medical accommodations made for those who wish to remain unvaccinated while avoiding having to threaten employment status. By the time we're done, we'll be pretty close to fully vaccinated as a company without going through all the divisiveness of a mandate.

"We're proving that you can work collaboratively with your people, trusting your people to make the right decisions, respecting their decisions and not forcing them over the loss of their jobs."

Back in August, Bastian's memo warned unvaccinated employees enrolled in Delta's health care plan they would be subject to higher premiums to cover increased costs associated with COVID.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki partially defended rising costs on everyday goods during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on Friday afternoon, saying that the costs were rising because demand is surging, which she called a "good thing."

"A year ago, people were in their homes, 10 percent of people were unemployed. Gas prices were low because nobody was driving. People weren't buying goods because they didn't have jobs. Now, more people have jobs, more people are buying goods, that's increasing the demand. That's a good thing.

"At the same time, we also know that the supply is low because we're coming out of the pandemic and because a bunch of manufacturing sectors across the world have shut down, because ports haven't been functioning as they should be. These are all things we're working through."

Watch:

Venezuela's government is halting negotiations with its opponents in retaliation for the extradition to the US of a close ally of president Nicolás Maduro, who prosecutors believe could be the most significant witness ever about corruption in the South American country.

Jorge Rodríguez, who has been heading the government's delegation, said his team wouldn't travel to Mexico City for the next scheduled round of negotiations.

The announcement capped a tumultuous day that saw Colombian-born businessman Alex Saab placed on a US-bound plane in Cape Verde after a 16-month fight by Maduro and his allies, including Russia, who consider Saab a Venezuelan diplomat.

The Venezuelan government in September named Saab - who was arrested in June 2020 when his plane stopped in Cape Verde to refuel - as a member of its negotiating team in talks with the opposition in Mexico, where the two sides are looking to solve their political crisis.

Rodriguez, reading from a statement, called the decision to suspend negotiations

"an expression of our deepest protest against the brutal aggression against the person and the investiture of our delegate Alex Saab Moran".

The leadership of Venezuela's opposition did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The US military is offering "condolence payments" to a family in Afghanistan after a badly planned drone strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children, in the country's capital in August, though did not provide any numbers.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby revealed the offer on Friday, stating that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made a "commitment" to the Akhmadi family for compensation following the August 29 drone strike, "including offering ex gratia condolence payments" and State Department assistance in relocating family members to the United States.

The offer was raised during a virtual meeting between Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl and Dr. Steven Kwon, who employed one of the Akhmadis killed in the strike at his US-based aid organization, Nutrition & Education International, long active in Afghanistan. Kirby went on:

"Kahl noted that the strike was a tragic mistake and that Mr. Zemari Akhmadi and others who were killed were innocent victims who bore no blame and were not affiliated with ISIS-K or threats to US forces."

Before 'Zero Covid' surfaced as the apparent goal of governments in the 'War Against The Virus', 'Zero Carbon' had become their goal in the 'War Against Climate Change'. What is up with this strange 'zeroing in' on the primary carbon source for life on Earth, and an ubiquitous and statistically benign coronavirus? How and why did governments decide that completely eradicating man-made CO2 would 'make the world a better place'?

Likewise with SARS-CoV-2, a virus that has likely by now infected and interacted with a majority of people on the planet, can we not adapt to live with it rather than upend our economies to 'eradicate it? Why such 'final solutions' to relatively minor factors in a complex ecosystem?

In this NewsReal, Joe and Niall discuss the extreme ideas eating away at the social fabric of global society.

** Podcast begins at 02:27 **


Running Time: 01:40:04

Download: MP3 — 68.7 MB

You can tell a lot about an item by the nicknames we give it. So what do our nicknames for the television tell us about that device?

"The idiot box."

"The boob tube."

"The tell-lie-vision."

It doesn't take a super sleuth to puzzle this one out. From the very inception of commercial television in the 1950s — when the phrase "boob tube" was first coined to lament the dumbing-down effect that the device was presumed to be having on the populace — to the zenith of the TV's cultural hegemony in the late 20th century, fears about the television's ability to create zombified couch potatoes out of its passive audience have been ever-present.

It's no coincidence that the 2006 comedy (or should that be docudrama?), Idiocracy, introduces its viewers to the eponymous future idiocracy — in which the intelligence of the population has declined to shockingly low levels — by showing a junk food-ingesting "lawyer" in the midst of enjoying the hit television show of the year 2505, Ow! My Balls! It's also no coincidence that the same movie sees protagonist Private Joe Bauers formulating a plan for heading off the development of this idiocracy by encouraging people to read books rather than watch TV.

We all know the trope: television makes you dumb, lazy and passive, and (by implication) it renders you susceptible to the lies and manipulations of those who create the TV programming. But is it true?

As it turns out, not only are concerns about the content and the presentation of TV programming well-founded, but there is an even darker side to the device than is commonly realized. There is ample research to suggest that the TV is actually designed to send you into a trance-like state that lowers your cognitive defences against the lies the TV networks (and their corporate owners) are attempting to push on their docile audience.

In order to understand this neglected part of the television story, we first have to reconsider the advent of commercial radio in the 1920s and the civilization-altering effects it wrought on the world in the 1930s.

China surprised U.S. officials by testing a new hypersonic missile in August that went around the globe before it made its way toward the intended target, a new report says.

China had made "astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than U.S. officials realized," two people told the Financial Times Saturday, with another source adding he or she was unsure how China was able to accomplish it.

The country has tested 79 missiles so far, according to the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology. Five people with knowledge of the launch told the outlet that the missile flew in low orbit before going down toward its target, which it missed by 24 miles.

President Biden on Thursday said the number of unvaccinated Americans still remains "unacceptably high," but insisted that his administration's vaccine requirements for the federal workforce and private employers are "working" to ensure more individuals receive shots to protect against COVID-19.

During remarks from the White House Thursday, the president touted his administration's "progress" in the "fight against the virus."

"We're making progress nationally. Daily cases are down 47%, hospitalizations are down 38% over the past six weeks. Over the past two weeks, most of the country has improved as well. Case rates are declining in 39 states and hospital rates declining in 38 states."

The president, though, said there "is still an unacceptably high number of unvaccinated people."

"Now's not the time to let up. We have a lot more to do," the president said, adding that the U.S. is "in a very critical period as we work to turn the corner on COVID-19."

Poland's prime minister has lashed out with accusations that EU institutions impede on the rights of its member nations following a ruling by the country's Constitutional Tribunal that Warsaw's laws reign supreme over Brussels'.

Speaking to the Polish parliament on Thursday, Mateusz Morawiecki proclaimed"

"We are at a crucial moment, you could say at a crossroads in the EU's history. Democracy is being tested - how far will European nations retreat before this usurpation by some EU institutions."

Morawiecki's accusations come as he is due to appear before the European Parliament next week to defend Poland's case after a landmark court verdict found Warsaw's constitution took primacy over EU laws.

The inquiry, which had been requested by Morawiecki to determine whether Brussels could stop the country from reorganizing its judiciary, concluded last week that some areas of EU Treaty articles are incompatible with Warsaw's laws and subordinate to Poland's constitution.

The ruling found that the country not only has the right to check the constitutionality of EU laws, but also rulings made by its Court of Justice.

A Russian general on Thursday said that Syrian air defenses did not engage Israeli jets that reportedly carried out a strike in central Syria because there were two civilian airliners in the air at the time.

A Britain-based war monitor said the alleged Israeli airstrike in central Syria killed nine pro-government fighters, four of them Syrians and five of undetermined nationality.

Syrian Rear Admiral Vadim Kulit told the Sputnik news site that the strike was carried out by four Israeli F-16 jets:

"The Syrian military leadership decided not to use air defense systems since at the time of the Israeli aviation attack, two civilian passenger aircraft were in the zone of destruction of the anti-aircraft systems."

Russia has repeatedly accused Israel of using civilian aircraft as a "shield" against Syrian air defenses, amid lingering anger over a case in 2018, when the Syrian military shot down a Russian spy plane while responding to an Israeli strike over Syrian airspace.