The new commander of the Oklahoma National Guard has declared the organization will not enforce the Defense Department’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate on its troops, according to local media outlets.

Army Brig. Gen. Thomas Mancino was announced as the state’s new adjutant general Wednesday, though he has not yet been confirmed by the state Senate, according to a press release from Gov. Kevin Stitt’s office.

The more than 150 million workers in the United States include about 16 million workers who identify as self-employed. They work for profit or fees in their own enterprises and are a representation of America’s small business owners. Many also create jobs for other workers, on the order of about 30 million in recent years.

The Covid-19 pandemic has boosted retirements among baby boomers, further straining the tight labor supply and leaving a hole for employers to fill.

Older workers who could least afford to retire early—those with lower incomes and less education—have been more likely to leave the workforce during the pandemic, researchers have found. The question is whether their retreat is temporary or permanent. Some retired because of Covid-19 fears, and others after failing to find suitable work.

A week before school started in the sunny desert city of St. George, Utah, Mike Carr waited at the front desk of the only emergency youth shelter in this southern Utah county.

He noticed a young mother on a sectional couch in the living room swaddling her infant in a pink blanket, idly watching a Marvel movie. In the neighboring kitchen, some teenagers — each a potential student that Carr hoped to talk to — prepared lunch before retiring to one of the shelter’s 15 beds.

Southwest Airlines has been hit by a second day of mass-flight cancellations, two days after the firm's pilots' union asked a court to block a COVID vaccine mandate.

The Dallas-based carrier canceled over 1,000 flights Sunday, equivalent to 27 per cent of its entire schedule for the day.

That came hot on the heels of 808 flights canceled on Saturday. Southwest has blamed a combination of inclement weather and staffing shortages at Jacksonville Air Traffic Control Center in Florida for the disruption.

The United States plans to ease travel restrictions on all fully vaccinated foreign visitors starting in November, the White House said Monday, relaxing a patchwork of bans that had begun to cause fury in Europe and replacing them with more uniform requirements for inbound international air passengers.

More Americans now disagree (41%) than agree (32%) that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has communicated a clear plan of action in response to the COVID-19 situation. This is the first Gallup reading since the CDC in late July changed its guidance on the need for face masks for unvaccinated people in areas of high coronavirus transmission.

New York City’s classrooms reopened on Monday to roughly a million children, most of whom were returning for the first time since the United States’ largest school system closed in March 2020.

While the city reopened schools last fall for part-time learning, the vast majority of students chose to keep learning remotely. But with no remote option now available to almost all parents, classrooms will be full for the first time in a year and a half.

More than a year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, America still doesn’t agree on what it’s trying to accomplish.

Is the goal to completely eradicate Covid-19? Is it to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed? Is it hitting a certain vaccine threshold that mitigates the worst Covid-19 outcomes but doesn’t prevent all infections? Or is it something else entirely?

At the root of this confusion is a big question the US, including policymakers, experts, and the general public, has never been able to answer: How many Covid-19 deaths are too many?

The U.S. pandemic response has provided international bad actors with a blueprint on how to “bring the United States to its knees,” according to a former member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Dr. Scott Atlas, former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, warned that the “draconian shutdowns” and other restrictions enacted in some cases by unelected public health officials, and their widespread acceptance by the public, have left the nation vulnerable.