WASHINGTON — President Biden, in what would be a significant shift in approach, is considering requiring all civilian federal employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or be forced to submit to regular testing, social distancing, mask requirements and restrictions on most travel, officials said on Tuesday.White House officials said they would reveal more about the president’s plans later this week. Mr. Biden said he would deliver a speech on Thursday about “the next steps in our effort to get more Americans vaccinated.”The deliberations reflect growing concern among top federal health officials about the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant, which poses a special threat to children, older Americans and those with weakened immune systems, including cancer patients. But that concern, officials said, must be balanced against the threat of a backlash that could drive opposition to vaccination.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is considering requiring all federal employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or be forced to submit to regular testing, social distancing, mask requirements and restrictions on most travel, officials said Tuesday — a dramatic shift in approach by President Biden that reflects the government’s growing concern about the spread of the highly-contagious Delta variant.Mr. Biden said on Tuesday that a vaccine mandate for all federal workers is under consideration, but did not provide details. Administration officials said the idea being debated was similar to a plan announced by New York City, which would require any of the city’s 300,00 employees who refuse to be vaccinated to submit to weekly testing.

There's always a lot to love about sheet pan dinners, but come summer they're particularly wonderful, as meals that only require one heat source become ideal. Making simple meals doesn't mean they can't be rich in nutrients, though: the omega-3s in this dinner will help support brain health, and they've also been linked to helping reduce inflammation."You get double omega-3s in this recipe with the tilapia and almonds," writes Molly Thompson in The Anti-Inflammatory Diet Made Simple, "The crust is crunchy and flavorful and the veggies are crispy, and it all cooks up to perfection in one pan!"The final dish is gluten and dairy-free, and takes less than an hour to make. If you wanted to swap in some different veggies, you might have to adjust the cook time, but otherwise you'd be able to use the same simple combo of garlic, salt, and pepper with almost any veggies.

Apple’s profits nearly doubled in the latest quarter, showing that the world’s richest and most valuable public company is exhibiting little sign of slowing down.Apple said on Tuesday that its profits increased 93 percent to $21.7 billion in its fiscal third quarter compared with a year earlier, while sales rose 36 percent to $81.4 billion, both outpacing analysts’ expectations.The company has posted growth rates in recent quarters that resemble a much smaller upstart rather than a corporate titan worth nearly $2.5 trillion. It has been fueled by people buying even more of its devices than usual during the pandemic, as they became more reliant on technology to work, study and socialize.

Conflict itself does not mean your relationship is doomed to last. On the contrary: It can be healthy for couples to have arguments! It’s how you manage said conflict that matters. How do you talk to each other when you're angry or upset?In a perfect world, you would approach your disgruntled partner with calm, I feel statements and everything would come up roses. But in real life, conflict isn’t so cookie cutter: Sometimes you get angry, things get heated, and it can be difficult to hold back from blurting hurtful things. Oftentimes, those productive methods to deal with conflict fly out the window. Psychologists John Gottman, Ph.D., and Julie Gottman, Ph.D., founders of the Gottman Institute (and arguably the world's leading relationship experts), know that this happens—in fact, they suggest on the mindbodygreen podcast that you take a 20-minute break when you lose your cool, then come back to the conversation with a fresh mind. Below, they explain the science involved.

Se espera que los Centros para el Control y la Prevención de Enfermedades (CDC, por su sigla en inglés) recomienden este martes que las personas vacunadas contra el coronavirus vuelvan a utilizar mascarillas en interiores en determinadas circunstancias, con lo que se revertiría una decisión tomada hace apenas dos meses en Estados Unidos.El cambio se produce tras los informes sobre el aumento de las infecciones con la variante delta del virus en personas totalmente inmunizadas. Sin embargo, la nueva orientación supondría un cambio abrupto respecto a la postura que la agencia mantiene desde mayo, según la cual las personas vacunadas no necesitan llevar cubrebocas en la mayoría de los espacios interiores.

Lloyd J. Austin III, the U.S. defense secretary, announced that the Biden administration has pledged to deliver 500 million doses of coronavirus vaccine around the world over the next year, including to the Indo-Pacific.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that people who have received the coronavirus vaccine should resume wearing masks in indoor public spaces, especially schools.

After over a year of canceled plans and missing our far flung friends and family due to the pandemic, people are taking to the skies again. And though we had some pretty good travel cleanliness routines in place back in 2019, we're likely a bit out of practice. Since getting sick is always a risk when on the road (or, more technically, in the air) we thought we'd refresh your memory on one particular spot you might not have thought to wipe down before settling in—but you definitely should be. The one spot on the plane you might not think to clean While most of us know well enough to wipe down the seat, seat belt, and tray table (a whopping 2,155 bacterial colony-forming units per square inch tend to reside on that last one), what we might fail to do is look up.If you're planning to use your air vent, you should definitely be wiping it down before switching it on. According to some data, it actually has more bacterial colony-forming units than even the lavatory flush button. Yikes! And since ventilation is likely on many of our minds lately, there's good reason you'd be reaching for it.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, just made in three months what it took until recently an entire year to earn. That is a level of growth that companies of its size rarely if ever achieve, but the pandemic has erased all the limits for tech firms.The search and advertising company on Tuesday reported record profits and revenue for the second quarter, vindicating the enthusiasm of investors who doubled its value on the stock market since early last year. The stellar results pushed shares up modestly in aftermarket trading.Alphabet said it made a profit of $18.5 billion, or $27.26 a share, for the quarter. As recently as 2015, it made less than that all year. Analysts did not see it coming, estimating on average that the company would earn only $19.14 a share in profit. Even the most optimistic analyst only forecast $24.43.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s declaration on Monday that more than 300,000 municipal workers in New York City must get vaccinated against the coronavirus or agree to weekly testing was an unwelcome surprise to many of the city’s municipal unions.Unions representing a diverse city work force of firefighters and paramedics have come out against the mayor’s mandate.Some unions have made demands: Exemptions for workers who have antibodies after recovering from Covid-19; workplace testing paid for by the city; overtime for workers who get tested outside work.And just about every major union has argued that the mayor cannot unilaterally impose the mandate without first negotiating with labor leaders.

A new study of hundreds of Black educators, students and parents found that Black students will be returning to the classroom this fall with disproportionate amounts of trauma and heightened mistrust of education, resulting from the coronavirus pandemic and continued instances of racial injustice.The study, released this month by the Black Education Research Collective at Teachers College, Columbia University, conducted online surveys and focus groups from January through May in six major U.S. cities to map the impact of the coronavirus on the education of Black youth. Participants included high school students, parents, teachers, educational administrators and community leaders who ranged in age from 14 to over 70 and all identified as Black.

Revising a decision made just two months ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesdaythat people vaccinated against the coronavirus should resume wearing masks in public indoor spaces in parts of the country where the virus is surging.C.D.C. officials also recommended universal masking for teachers, staff, students and visitors in schools, regardless of vaccination status and community transmission of the virus. With additional precautions, schools nonetheless should return to in-person learning in the fall, according to agency officials.The recommendations are another baleful twist in the course of America’s pandemic, a war-weary concession that the virus is outstripping vaccination efforts. The agency’s move follows rising case counts in states like Florida and Missouri, as well as growing reports of breakthrough infections of the more contagious Delta variant among people who are fully immunized.

The past year and a half may have been one of the most disruptive periods of time in recent real estate history. Some cities lost their luster during lockdowns while smaller towns boomed.The pandemic offered many people the opportunity to redefine their living situations and to reassess what home means to them. They moved across the country to live near family, or left a city for a house with a back yard, or found a cheaper apartment in a new neighborhood.For others, moving became a necessity, not an opportunity, when schools closed, or with a job loss.If you changed homes during the pandemic, we’d love to hear about it. How are you doing? We may feature your response in “Our Changing Lives,” a new series in the Coronavirus Briefing newsletter about big lifestyle shifts during the pandemic.

Millions of Americans are preparing for a return to the office. But millions more are returning to work at hospitals, retail stores, restaurants, schools and other non-office jobs (or office support jobs). For a short series, we are soliciting stories from those workers about their concerns and hopes for the future.If you are one of them, please share your stories and thoughts below. We may feature them in our return to work series. We will not publish any part of your submission without contacting you first.

The White House is masking up again, just over two months after President Biden and senior government officials shed their face coverings in the biggest sign to date that the country was moving toward normalcy.The shift came after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesdaythat people vaccinated against the coronavirus should resume wearing masks in public indoor spaces in parts of the country where the virus is surging, amid growing reports of breakthrough infections of the more contagious Delta variant among people who are fully immunized.An email to the White House staff with instructions to begin wearing masks again indoors arrived at 5 p.m. on the dot, an hour after the C.D.C. updated its county data online. The new data moved Washington, D.C., from yellow to orange, indicating that it has a “substantial” level of community transmission, senior officials said.

Elementary school students in the United States ended the 2020-21 school year four to five months behind where they normally would have been in academic achievement, according to a report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. that was released Tuesday. It found that many of the most vulnerable students experienced the steepest setbacks.The new report — based on assessments taken by more than 1.6 million elementary school students who had returned to the classroom in the spring — is the latest indication that students who were already experiencing educational inequities were also hit hardest by the crisis.For example, students attending schools whose student bodies were mainly Black or Hispanic ended the school year six months behind where they normally would have been in math, compared with four months behind for students in mainly white schools.

A huge majority of more than 120,000 creditors of Purdue Pharma have voted to approve the company’s bankruptcy plan, a key step toward the eventual release of more than $4.5 billion dollars to help pay for the costs of the opioid epidemic and the resolution of thousands of lawsuits against the company and its owners, members of the billionaire Sackler family.Preliminary tabulation of voting by cities, states, tribes, insurers, families and caregivers of babies born with symptoms of withdrawal from being exposed to opioids in utero shows that 95 percent favor the plan, the company said.Under the plan, the Sacklers would relinquish control of Purdue. The restructured company would re-emerge with a new name, and be run by an independently appointed board. Profitsfrom sales of its signature prescription painkiller, OxyContin, and addiction-reversal drugs would flow into creditors’ trusts that would fund addiction prevention and treatment programs.

SACRAMENTO — Gabriel Montoya, an emergency medical technician, watched in horror as gasping patients overwhelmed the intensive care unit at Kaiser Permanente Downey Medical Center in southeastern Los Angeles County late last year. Eight out of 10 admissions were infected with Covid-19 at one point.“Even with all that — with the amount of people who died, the amount we saw intubated,” Mr. Montoya said, he and his fellow union leaders have had trouble getting even half of the 300 rank-and-file members in the hospital’s emergency room vaccinated.He said he had tried to use shift huddles as a time for gentle persuasion, but “you get the rolling of the eyes and the walking away as soon as you mention vaccinations.” So as California moved this week to require two million health care workers to get immunized or submit to weekly testing, his hope was tempered with skepticism.

The Dutch delegation said it was unhappy about the quarantine conditions for those who tested positive for the coronavirus, two officials said during a news conference on Tuesday. They said they would raise their concerns with the International Olympic Committee, as well as the Dutch ambassador in Japan. Six members of the Dutch delegation, including at least two athletes, tested positive for the coronavirus, they said.“They’ve lost their Olympic dream, and then they’re being put in terrible circumstances,”Maurits Hendriks, the technical director for the Dutch Olympic Committee, said, adding that those quarantined “weren’t allowed to see a moment of daylight.” He called their rooms “little boxes.”

The Washington Post will require all employees to show that they are vaccinated against the coronavirus, the newspaper’s publisher said on Tuesday.The Post’s publisher, Frederick J. Ryan Jr., said in an email to staff that the company had decided to require proof of vaccination as a condition of employment, starting when workers return to the office in September, after hearing concerns from many employees about the emergence of coronavirus variants.“Even though the overwhelming majority of Post employees have already provided proof of vaccination, I do not take this decision lightly,” Mr. Ryan wrote in the email, which was viewed by The New York Times. “However, in considering the serious health issues and genuine safety concerns of so many Post employees, I believe the plan is the right one.”

LL Cool J, Elvis Costello, Andrea Bocelli, Carlos Santana and the New York Philharmonic will join Bruce Springsteen and other artists next month at the starry Central Park concert that the city is planning to herald its comeback from the pandemic, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday.The mayor said that concertgoers would need to show proof of vaccination.“We want this to be a concert for the people,” Mr. de Blasio said at a video news conference, announcing more of the headliners — and the name — of the event, “We Love NYC: The Homecoming Concert,” which will be held on the Great Lawn on Aug. 21. “But I also want to be clear: It has to be a safe concert. It has to be a concert that helps us keep moving forward our recovery.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York announced that next month there will be a concert in Central Park to celebrate the city’s recovery from the coronavirus, with performances from LL Cool J, Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen.

President Biden said a mandate requiring all federal employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus was under consideration, reflecting concern over the spread of the Delta variant.