Business

It’s a good week for Novavax. The Gaithersburg vaccine maker has earned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation to make its protein-based shot available as a booster to adults in the U.S., the last hurdle required before people can use it beyond a primary series. The CDC said late Wednesday that its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, greenlit the decision — which gives initially vaccinated adults the choice to get Novavax’s jab as a booster instead of the updated Omicron-specific shots from Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna.

The Labor Department has proposed a rule that would make it easier for delivery drivers, janitors, construction workers and other independent contractors to be considered employees, granting them access to benefits and federal labor protections. The proposal would overturn a Trump-era move and restore Obama-era standards for determining whether workers qualify as employees or independent contractors.

Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. will roll out its local sports streaming service nationwide in September following what executives described as a “better than expected” soft launch earlier this summer. The Hunt Valley-based broadcaster rolled out its direct-to-consumer service, which it’s calling Bally Sports+, to five markets on June 23, streaming MLB games in Detroit, Kansas City, Miami, Milwaukee and Tampa.

Washington, D.C., and over half the states in the United States are raising their minimum wage this year, with residents of the nation’s capital getting the biggest boost. Beginning this past Sunday, D.C.’s living wage will increase to $16.50 an hour. This amount will later increase to $17 an hour on July 1, making it the highest minimum wage within the U.S., according to a news release from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office.

In 48 U.S. states, it is illegal to text and drive a car. An airline pilot can’t use a cellphone for personal reasons while flying a plane. But there is no policy forbidding such a practice when it comes to guiding 1,100-foot ships through the narrow channels of Maryland waters. That could change soon. In March, the Ever Forward, a container ship as long as three football fields and weighing about 130,000 tons (for comparison, the average car weighs about 2), steamed out of one of those channels into the shallows of the Chesapeake Bay, getting stuck for more than a month.

Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, a gaming company famous for hits like Call of Duty, disputed the Federal Trade Commission’s challenge to their proposed $68.7 billion merger on Thursday, writing in a court filing that the U.S. regulator’s concerns that the deal would undermine fair competition in the gaming industry are “unfounded” and “absurd.” The rebuttal foreshadows a coming legal battle between Microsoft, a tech giant that has largely avoided close regulatory scrutiny from federal authorities in recent years, and the FTC, whose chairwoman Lina Khan is a well-known skeptic of big tech.

Stephanie Linnartz, president of the hotel chain Marriott International, will become the next CEO of Under Armour, the company announced Wednesday. Linnartz has worked at Marriott for 25 years, rising through the ranks to become the company’s president in 2021, the Baltimore-based athletic apparel brand said in a news release. “She is a proven growth leader with a distinguished track record of brand strategy, omnichannel execution, talent acquisition and development, and passion for driving best-in-class consumer connectivity, experience, and brand loyalty,” Under Armour founder Kevin Plank said in a statement.

Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. is bringing its 19 regional sports networks back into the streaming space with a new agreement with FuboTV. The carriage agreement to get the networks back on FuboTV, which was for an undisclosed figure, comes as there have been fewer ways to watch the RSNs online and as the networks have struggled financially. The RSNs have been dropped by a host of online TV providers including YouTube TV, Sling TV and Hulu TV.