President Donald Trump has returned to the campaign trail less than two weeks after testing positive for coronavirus. He told thousands of supporters, many not wearing masks, that he could give them “a big fat kiss”, at a rally in the battleground state of Florida. His rival, Joe Biden, speaking in Ohio, accused the president of “reckless behavior” since his diagnosis.
Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson said Monday it has paused the advanced clinical trial of its experimental coronavirus vaccine because of an unexplained illness in one of the volunteers. Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine arm is developing the shot. The company did not say what the unexplained illness was, but one point of clinical trials is to find out if vaccines cause dangerous side effects.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., ended the first day of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing with a warning of the tough road that lies ahead. It appears that a major part of Democrats’ strategy for opposing Barrett is her past criticism of the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision that upheld the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.
“This world is threatened. We really saw how the ice is disappearing,” said Markus Rex, leader of the largest-ever Arctic expedition, at a press conference Monday. Researchers involved in the expedition called MOSAiC — Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate — returned on the German vessel, the Polarstern, which spent more than a year at sea.
Pope Francis said the beatification of an Italian computer whiz-kid was a sign to young people that “true happiness comes from putting God first”. Carlo Acutis, who is on a path to sainthood after being beatified in the Umbrian town of Assisi, helped spread Roman Catholic teaching online before his death from leukaemia aged 15 in 2006. He is the youngest contemporary person to be beatified.