Lionel Messi (Image: Nick Potts/PA Wire)

Another week dawns and New South Wales is locked down and has thrown away the key, Victoria is weaving in and out for the foreseeable future, and just as greater Brisbane climbs out of lockdown, Cairns and Yarrabah fall back in. The other states are faring better for now but know lockdown is only a moment of bad luck or carelessness away.

All this is stressful enough without the details — Delta, more infectious and skews “sicker, quicker and younger” (including children). Last week a 27-year-old man died, Australia’s youngest COVID death. Just under 20% of Australians are fully vaccinated.

It’s become easy to forget that events not directly concerning COVID-19 are still happening out there in the world. So we thought we’d bring you up to speed.

Champange supernova

Scientists have captured for the first time a supernova from start to finish. The now defunct Kepler space telescope just happened to looking in the right place at the right time in 2017 and caught the explosion of a massive yellow star about a billion years ago.

“We’ve always missed the very, very start of a [supernova] because it is so exceedingly difficult to capture that,” ANU’s Patrick Armstrong, lead author of the resulting paper, told the ABC. The work will give us hitherto unseen insights into the evolution, life and death of massive stars.

Lionel Messi free

One of the greatest footballers of all time is without a club for the first time since he was 13. Lionel Messi has been at Barcelona in all that time and for 17 seasons has helped the Catalan giants lift an incredible 35 trophies. So why is one of Europe’s most successful clubs parting with its greatest ever player?

“Despite FC Barcelona and Lionel Messi having reached an agreement and the clear intention of both parties to sign a new contract today, this cannot happen because of financial and structural obstacles [of Spanish Liga regulations],” the club announced.

It returns to some of the issues driving the European Super League debacle earlier this year — out of control money has turned the top leagues of Europe into a quaking Jenga tower. Barcelona blames the Spanish Liga’s financial regulations — a salary cap imposed on account of COVID — which obviously didn’t help, but the club’s been a financial basket case for quite some time.

Electric vehicles

As if the United States hadn’t been through enough in recent years, US President Biden Joe Biden is coming for their weekend. He’s announced a plan to rapidly shift Americans to electric vehicles over the next decade.

The plan, which calls for tougher pollution rules and increases mileage standards, sets a target that half of all vehicles sold in the US be electric by 2030, in keeping with Biden’s commitment to cut planet-warming emissions by 50% (from 2005 levels) by 2030. The three largest carmakers in the US — GM, Ford and Stellantis — signed on to the plan on the condition that Congress pays for a national network of electric vehicle charging stations.

Everyone gets a gold medal day

Via freedom-of-information gun and friend of Crikey William Summers, Australia’s non-Olympian members of Parliament have been treating themselves to gold medals at our expense. According to Summers:

Federal MPs been gifted more than $10,000 worth of commemorative gold medallions since 2016, thanks to an obscure entitlement that can be traced back more than a century to the early days of federation. The medallions have been commissioned by Parliament and paid for by taxpayers.

Every new MP and senator has been awarded at least one medallion — officially known as an ‘electorate medallion’ or ‘badge of office’ — which are crafted by the Australian Royal Mint and presented to each politician when they are first elected to Parliament. The items were once used to verify the identity of federal politicians but are now gifted to parliamentarians purely as a memento of their time in Canberra.

The GOAT of posting returns

And, finally, we’ve been blessed with a reminder that former US president Donald Trump is still focused on the issues that matter. After the US women’s soccer team beat our own Matildas 4-3 to take bronze at the Olympics, Trump had some thoughts. Was the team, dominant for so long, complacent? Over-reliant on stars like Megan Rapinoe? Nope. The reason the team failed to win gold is because … it’s woke.

The whole thing is worth checking out, but his concluding line is one for the ages: “The lady with the purple hair played terribly and spends too much time thinking about radical left politics and not doing her job!”