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French Prime Minister Jean Castex said Friday the government was not planning a new, nationwide lockdown in response to a dramatic spike in COVID-19 cases this week. In a televised statement in Paris, following a meeting with the Defense Council, Castex acknowledged the COVID-19 situation has gotten worse, and he urged citizens to practice social distancing and wear masks. In addition, he said, the government would take steps to slow the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.  He said these measures would include fast-tracked testing for priority cases and giving local authorities the power to make some businesses reduce opening hours. But the French prime minister said they would not “put on hold our social, cultural and economic lives, the education of our children, and our capability to live normally.” The French government is under renewed pressure to curb the spread of the disease as health authorities Thursday reported 9,843 new confirmed coronavirus cases, a new record, topping the previous record of 8,975, set six days earlier. French health experts have called on the government to act to avoid a second wave of the virus. The head of the government’s scientific council, Jean-François Delfraissy, said Wednesday the government needs to make “a number of difficult decisions in the next 10 days.”  In March, France imposed a strict lockdown. That succeeded in preventing the hospital system from being overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases, but it also dealt a severe blow to the economy. That lockdown was relaxed in early May. 
 
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Rio Tinto’s decision to part ways with its CEO and two senior executives reflects heightened investor concern over social issues and the loss of “social license” to operate, governance groups and investors said.The global miner said on Friday chief executive Jean-Sébastien Jacques and two other executives would step down following an outcry over its decision to detonate part of an ancient gorge that showed 46,000 years of human habitation.The move comes as investors are demanding increased transparency in how companies manage environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks, said Danielle Welsh-Rose, Aberdeen Standard Investments ESG Investment Director, Asia Pacific.”The leadership changes at Rio Tinto today are significant in many ways, including showing that investors and other stakeholders will hold companies to account on their ESG performance,” she said.Rio had been slow to recognize the importance of ESG issues following recent banking scandals in Australia, said Vas Kolesnikoff, Australian head of governance adviser ISS.”This is the social license to operate. If you don’t adhere to appropriate conduct and standards, you’re going to fall foul of investors,” he said.Ben Cleary, a partner at Tribeca Investment Partners said the Rio departures were a big moment for the mining industry.”For the CEO and a couple of senior management to go over an ESG issue, it’s just going to reverberate through board rooms throughout the resource sector,” he said, adding that it could slow down the sector.Rio’s detonations, which allowed it to access higher-grade ore, also came amid a wider movement in Australia focused on the treatment of aboriginal groups, who fall behind the general population on markers ranging from child mortality to literacy.Land rights barrister Greg McIntyre said it was too early to say whether Rio’s move signaled a turning point in relation to dealings with aboriginal groups.”What it does indicate is that this issue is being taken seriously, which is a positive development, but it’s not a solution to the problem.” 
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India has recorded nearly 100,000 new COVID-19 cases in one day. The South Asian nation said Friday there had been 96,551 new cases in the previous 24-hour period.India has a total of 4.5 million COVID cases.With almost 6.4 million infections, the United States is the only country that has more COVID infections than India.In the U.S. cases of COVID-19 are “increasingly rapidly among young adults,” according to a research letter from Harvard, published at the online site of the JAMA medical journal.The study included 3,222 young adults between the ages of 18 and 34.The investigation found that the young adults “experienced substantial rates of adverse outcomes: 21% required intensive care, 10% required mechanical ventilation, and 2.7% died.”Patients with morbid obesity, hypertension, and diabetes were at “greater risks of adverse events.” The young adults with more than one of the conditions, the researchers found, “faced risks comparable with those observed in middle-aged adults without them.” Black and Hispanic patients made up more than half of the patients who required hospitalization.A separate Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report says an investigation of symptomatic outpatients from 11 U.S. health facilities found that people who tested positive for COVID-19 were twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant than those who tested negative.British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced this week his government will launch an ambitious program to test at least half a million people daily for COVID-19, with the results back within minutes. Johnson said he hoped the “moonshot” program — a reference to the 1960s-era American manned lunar landing program — will be in place before the end of the year, and would return Britain to some sort of normality and grant more freedom to those who test negative for the coronavirus.Johnson coupled the announcement of the mass testing initiative with a new order limiting the number of people taking part in most social gatherings to six, from the current 30.The new limit would take effect next week, as Britain is experiencing a surge of nearly 3,000 new COVID-19 cases daily in recent weeks, the highest daily figures since May.Britain’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whittey says the new “rule of six” restrictions are likely to remain in place for several months.Johns Hopkins University reports there are more than 28 million cases of COVID-19 cases worldwide with more than 900,000 deaths. 
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Leaders of Mali’s military junta will resume their three-day “national consultation” Friday to outline a transition to a civilian government, a month after deposing President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.On Thursday, Colonel Assimi Goita, the head of Mali’s junta, told political parties and civil society groups gathered in the capital, Bamako, that everyone “must put aside their differences to lay the foundations for a reformed Mali, refounded on work, efficiency and social justice.”Goita and a group of mutinous soldiers carried out the coup, which led to Keita’s resignation on August 18.The junta says it wants Mali to return to civilian rule, but multiple discussions with regional leaders have yet to result in an agreement on a clear path forward with civilian transitional leaders.The West African regional bloc, ECOWAS, has insisted the junta, known as the National Committee for the Salvation of the People, install civilian transition leaders by September 15 and hold an election within a year for a president and prime minister.The military has been seeking a three-year transition, to include the writing of a new constitution. 
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Protests aimed at police brutality in Colombia’s capital, Bogota, erupted into violence for a second night Thursday, with at least nine deaths reported over the past two days.Protesters set fire to city buses and some threw stones and bottles at police, who fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades toward the demonstrators protesting this week’s death of a 46-year-old law student.Police were caught on video repeatedly shocking the student, Javier Ordonez, with a stun gun as he begged them to stop. He died at the hospital.Police say Ordonez was detained after he was spotted drinking alcohol in the street with friends, in violation of coronavirus distancing rules.Since the protests started Wednesday, Bogota officials say police stations and vehicles have been vandalized and hundreds of civilians and police officers injured in addition to the nine deaths.Two officers suspected of involvement in the alleged abuse of Ordonez have been suspended pending an investigation. 
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A panel of judges Thursday declared unlawful a directive from President Donald Trump to exclude people who are in the United States illegally from representation when apportioning congressional seats.The decision by a three-judge panel, which could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, is a victory for the 38 states, cities and counties, plus several immigrants rights nonprofits, that sued over the July 21 directive.The mostly Democratic-leaning plaintiffs, led by New York state, accused the Republican president of having a “xenophobic” purpose in pushing an unconstitutional directive that reflected “discriminatory animus” toward Hispanics and other immigrant communities.They said the directive could leave several million people uncounted and shift a few House of Representatives seats, with California, Texas and New Jersey most likely to suffer losses.The White House and the Department of Commerce, which oversees the census, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.In its 86-page decision, the panel said Trump exceeded his statutory authority in ordering the directive.It said federal law required the use of one set of numbers to count people for census and apportionment purposes, and that so long as they resided in the United States, “illegal aliens qualify as ‘persons in’ a ‘state'” who should be counted.”The president must act in accordance with, and within the boundaries of, the authority that Congress has granted,” the panel said. “We conclude that the president did not do so.”Thursday’s decision is a fresh census-related legal setback for Trump, who has made curbing immigration a focus of his presidency and reelection campaign.His directive came one year after the Supreme Court blocked his attempt to add a citizenship question to the census.”President Trump’s repeated attempts to hinder, impair, and prejudice an accurate census and the subsequent apportionment have failed once again,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement.In defending the directive, government lawyers said Trump had broad discretion to decide who to count, and that any harm was speculative.The plaintiffs countered that the directive would cause irreparable harm by dissuading immigrant households from census participation and reducing political power.Census data is also used to allocate billions of dollars of federal funds.”The law is clear – every person counts in the census,” said American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Dale Ho, who represented the nonprofits.The panel consisted of Circuit Judges Richard Wesley and Peter Hall, both appointed to the bench by Republican President George W. Bush, and District Judge Jesse Furman, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama.  
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NASA on Thursday launched an effort to pay companies to mine resources on the moon, announcing it would buy from them rocks, dirt and other lunar materials as the U.S. space agency seeks to spur private extraction of coveted off-world resources for its use. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote in a blog post accompanying the announcement that the plans would not violate a 1967 treaty that holds that celestial bodies and space are exempt from national claims of ownership. FILE – NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine talks to multiple media outlets at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Nov. 26, 2018.The initiative, targeting companies that plan to send robots to mine lunar resources, is part of NASA’s goal of setting what Bridenstine called “norms of behavior” in space and allowing private mining on the moon in ways that could help sustain future astronaut missions. NASA said it views the mined resources as the property of the company, and the materials would become “the sole property of NASA” after purchase. Under NASA’s Artemis program, President Donald Trump’s administration envisions a return of American astronauts to the moon by 2024. NASA has cast such a mission as a precursor to a future first human voyage to Mars. “The bottom line is we are going to buy some lunar soil for the purpose of it demonstrating that it can be done,” Bridenstine said during an event hosted by the Secure World Foundation, a space policy organization. Bridenstine said NASA eventually would buy more types of resources such as ice and other materials that may be discovered on the moon. NASA in May set the stage for a global debate over the basic principles governing how people will live and work on the moon, releasing the main tenets of what it hopes will become an international pact for moon exploration called the Artemis Accords. This would permit companies to own the lunar resources they mine, a crucial element in allowing NASA contractors to convert the moon’s water ice for rocket fuel or mine lunar minerals to construct landing pads. ‘Giant leap’ for policy, precedentUnder the initiative disclosed on Thursday, NASA offered to purchase limited amounts of lunar resources and asked companies to offer proposals. Under contracts whose terms would vary, a company mining on the moon would collect lunar rocks or dirt to sell to NASA without having to bring the resources back to Earth. “This is one small step for space resources, but a giant leap for policy and precedent,” Mike Gold, NASA’s chief of international relations, told Reuters. “They are paying the company to sell them a rock that the company owns. That’s the product,” Joanne Gabrynowicz, former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Space Law, said in an interview. “A company has to decide for itself if it’s worth taking the financial and technological risk to do this to sell a rock.”
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