Top Stories this PM: Florida court sides with DeSantis over mask rules ban; CEOs welcome vax-or-test mandate

Good afternoon. Here are the top stories so far today.

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What happened today:

• Florida appeals court reinstates DeSantis order banning masks rules in schools. A Florida circuit judge on Friday issued a stay in Gov. DeSantis' mask mandate ban, effectively reinstating DeSantis' order barring public schools in the state from requiring face masks, Reuters reported. This follows a Second Circuit judge who ruled the opposite earlier this week. The ruling effectively reverses any mask mandates Florida schools had previously put in place.
• CEOs welcome Biden's vax-or-test mandate. Business Roundtable, a lobbyist group whose members include chief executives from companies like Amazon, Walmart, Apple, Google, and Home Depot, said in a statement Thursday that it supports Biden's plan requiring companies with over 100 workers to mandate vaccines or weekly tests. "America's business leaders know how critical vaccination and testing are in defeating the pandemic," Joshua Bolten, the group's president, said.
• Justice Stephen Breyer is "very, very, very" against Texas abortion decision. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer criticized his fellow conservative justices' recent decision to uphold a strict Texas law that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Breyer, the court's most senior liberal member, called the majority opinion "very, very, very, wrong," in an interview with NPR published on Friday.
• Biden tells Republicans threatening to sue over vaccine mandates to "have at it." President Joe Biden dared Republican governors and lawmakers to sue his administration over newly unveiled vaccine mandates after speaking at Brookland Middle School in Washington, DC, on school reopenings. "Have it at," Biden told a reporter who asked him about potential legal challenges to the administration's new, wide-ranging COVID-19 vaccination requirements.
• Giuliani associate Igor Fruman pleads guilty. Igor Fruman, a Soviet-born Ukrainian businessman and a former associate of Rudy Giuliani, pleaded guilty on Friday to one count of soliciting a contribution by a foreign national. He and his associates, Lev Parnas, David Correia, and Andrey Kukushkin, were arrested in October 2019 and charged with campaign-finance violations, conspiracy, making false statements to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and falsifying records.

That's all for now. See you Monday.

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