| |  |  | The Reuters Daily Briefing | Friday, December 17, 2021 by Linda Noakes | Hello Here's what you need to know. A U.S. judge tosses a deal shielding the Sacklers from opioid lawsuits, UK voters give scandal-hit PM Johnson a kicking, and why Boeing wants to build its next airplane in the 'metaverse' | | | | | Today's biggest stories  A man wearing a protective face mask walks past the Bank of England after the BoE became the first major central bank to raise rates since the pandemic, in London, December 16, 2021. REUTERS/Toby Melville BUSINESS Stocks fell as investors worried about surging Omicron cases and wrestled with this week's hawkish turn from major central banks in the fight against inflation.
Wall Street banks and investment firms are retrenching from their push to get staff back to the office, with Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group, Carlyle Group, Blackstone and MetLife among the latest to adjust plans as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus spreads.
A federal judge overturned a roughly $4.5 billion settlement that legally shielded members of the Sackler family who stand accused of helping fuel the U.S. opioid epidemic, a decision that threatened to upend the bankruptcy reorganization of their company, OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma.
Fox News Network lost its attempt to dismiss a $1.6 billion lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine company that says Fox defamed it by amplifying conspiracy theories about its technology.
In Boeing's factory of the future, immersive 3-D engineering designs will be twinned with robots that speak to each other, while mechanics around the world will be linked by $3,500 HoloLens headsets made by Microsoft. It is a snapshot of an ambitious new strategy to unify sprawling design, production and airline services operations under a single digital ecosystem - in as little as two years.
|  President Joe Biden meets with members of the White House COVID-19 Response Team in the Roosevelt Room in the White House, December 16, 2021. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein U.S. U.S. President Joe Biden appeared to acknowledge that his Build Back Better spending bill may not pass Congress in the remaining weeks of this year, saying Democrats would seek to advance the legislation "over the days and weeks ahead."
The Biden administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift rulings by two lower courts that put the president's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers on hold, saying the shots were crucial before an expected winter spike in cases.
The U.S. government permanently eased some restrictions on a pill used to terminate early pregnancies, allowing the drug to be sent by mail rather than requiring it to be dispensed in person. The decision by the Food and Drug Administration comes as the right to obtain an abortion, established in the 1973 Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade, hangs in the balance.
Longtime Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone will invoke the constitutional protection against self-incrimination during an interview today with the committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. Stone's attorney, Grant Smith, said in an e-mail that his client will appear for a closed-door deposition before the House of Representatives committee but will not answer any questions.
Police obtained a search warrant for actor Alec Baldwin's cellphone in the investigation of October's fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the New Mexico set of his Western movie 'Rust', court documents showed.
| | | | | | | | | Video of the day  Civilians prepare to battle Myanmar's military rulers Reuters has taken rare footage in Myanmar of young men and women who say they have left jobs in the city to become guerrilla fighters in the jungle. | | | Thanks for spending part of your day with us. | | | | | |
