Biden said he will meet goal of 100 million vaccines in his first 100 days on Friday

Over each of the past five days, the most important conversation for Virginia men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett has had nothing to do with strategy, even with the fourth-seeded Cavaliers scheduled to open the NCAA tournament Saturday night.

Bennett instead has waited impatiently to hear from head athletic trainer Ethan Saliba, who provides him with the results of players’ coronavirus tests. The days have been marked by unease and then relief, with no new positives since one undisclosed player tested positive the morning after Virginia won in Thursday’s ACC quarterfinals.

Google will spend billions this year on new offices, doubling down on a return to in-person work as other companies consider a future where working from home is the norm.

The tech giant will spend $7 billion on new offices and expanding data centers, including adding offices in Texas, North Carolina and Minnesota. In its home state of California, the company will spend $1 billion, and plans to complete and open a giant new campus in Silicon Valley that’s been under construction for years.

Google was one of the first major U.S. companies to send its workers home in March 2020 as covid-19 began to spread rapidly across the U.S. It now plans to bringing employees back to the office in September 2021, but unlike Facebook and Twitter, it hasn’t given workers the option of working remotely permanently.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, 13-year-old Madilyn “Maddie” Dayton played volleyball and basketball and ran track. She attended in-person school — and still had plenty of energy left over to race around her small town of Cokeville, Wyo., with friends.

Today, more than six months after being infected with the virus, she’s struggling with lingering effects of her illness.

While doctors recently cleared her for limited physical activity, Maddie estimates she can do only about half of what she used to do. Even Zoom school can be too much some days.

Daniel Stokes breathed a sigh of relief when he got his first coronavirus vaccine. Then he panicked: After a year in loungewear and pajamas, what would he wear when life resumed?

He went online and spent $450 on jeans, shirts, cardigans and boots to tide him over until he figures out what else he’ll need. Aside from a few pandemic splurges — it was his first shopping spree in more than a year. “It was like a switch went off and I realized, oh my goodness, I have to go back into the world,” said Stokes, 31, a senior manager for an upscale luggage company, who has been working out of his Brooklyn apartment for the past year.

The Prime Ministers of France and Britain, Jean Castex and Boris Johnson, said they will get the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot on Friday, as European governments are seeking to boost trust in the vaccine following its week-long suspension across many parts of the continent. Speaking at a press conference, Castex said his vaccination with the AstraZeneca product is intended to "show that we can have complete confidence.

”Denmark and Norway were among the first countries to suspend the vaccine last week after reports of blood clots as possible side effects. Larger nations like France and Germany followed this week, even as British authorities saw no reason to suspend vaccinations.

When a Bahraini prince flew to Nepal to climb Mount Everest this week, he didn’t show up empty-handed: Among his cargo were some 2,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine, according posts on his climbing team’s Instagram account.

It quickly became evident that the gesture, intended as a munificent gift for a remote mountain village, would turn out to be more of an international faux pas.

Nepal bans drug imports without permission, and health officials there said they had no idea that Sheikh Mohamed Hamad Mohamed al-Khalifa planned to carry out his own small-scale vaccination campaign. Taken by surprise, regulators are now investigating the breach of protocols, and have yet to make a decision on whether the doses can be used.

Pressing the case for immunization as the best way to fend off new variants of the coronavirus, President Biden said Thursday the nation would surpass his goal of administering 100 million shots in his first 100 days on Friday — more than 40 days early.

The goal, which seemed ambitious when it was announced before distribution had begun in December, quickly became mismatched with the pace of inoculations. Already in January a million shots were reliably being administered each day. The daily average has reached about 2.5 million, Biden said in brief remarks delivered from the East Room.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex on Thursday announced that Paris and several other parts of the country will enter a new lockdown Friday night, as the more transmissible coronavirus variant first identified in Britain is prompting a surge in hospitalizations.

The lockdown measures are expected to be in place for four weeks, Castex said during a news conference. During that time, travel from regions under lockdown will be restricted, and nonessential businesses will be closed in the impacted areas.