Weekly News Quiz for Students

Lawmakers voted 232 to 197 to approve a single impeachment article. It accused President Trump of “inciting violence against the government of the United States,” after a mob of his supporters stormed and occupied the Capitol as members of Congress were certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the November election. The impeachment article called for Trump to be removed and disqualified from ever holding public office again.

Trump is the first president in American history to be impeached twice. The House also impeached him in December 2019, accusing him of pressuring a foreign government to help him win the 2020 presidential election. But no House Republicans supported it, Trump was acquitted by the Senate in a mostly party-line vote, and he remained in office. This time, all 222 Democrats in the House voted for impeachment but also 10 Republicans crossed party lines and voted to impeach Trump.

The House’s action set the stage for the second Senate trial of the president in a year. The precise timing of that proceeding remained in doubt, though, as senators appeared unlikely to convene to sit in judgment before Jan. 20, when Biden will take the oath of office and Trump will become a former president.

With the 2020 results, the last seven years have been the warmest since the beginning of modern record-keeping nearly a century and a half ago, Gavin Schmidt, the institute’s director, said.

“We are now very, very clear about the underlying long-term trends,” he said. “We understand where they come from. It’s because of the greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere.”

The record warmth fueled deadly heat waves, droughts, intense wildfires, and other environmental disasters around the world in 2020.

Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was arrested after deciding to leave the relative safety of Germany, where he had been recovering from last summer’s poisoning.

Navalny, long one of Putin’s most prominent critics, collapsed and fell into a coma in August. Laboratories determined he had been poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent which was developed in the Soviet Union and Russia.

The opposition leader vowed to return to Russia once he recovered, and last week announced his plans to fly to Moscow, despite the threat of arrest upon arrival.

Hundreds of people braved the bitter cold outside Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport to greet Navalny, but the low-cost Russian airline he was flying was diverted just before landing to a different Moscow airport. There, at passport control, Navalny was confronted by uniformed policemen in black masks.

He embraced his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, before being led away. “I am not afraid,” Navalny told reporters just before he was detained, standing in front of a neon sign at the airport that portrayed the Kremlin. “I know that I am in the right and that all the criminal cases against me are fabricated.”

The package includes more than $400 billion to combat the pandemic directly, including money to accelerate vaccine deployment and to safely reopen most schools within 100 days. Another $350 billion would help state and local governments bridge budget shortfalls, while the plan would also include $1,400 direct payments to individuals, more generous unemployment benefits, federally mandated paid leave for workers, and large subsidies for child care costs.

“During this pandemic, millions of Americans, through no fault of their own, have lost the dignity and respect that comes with a job and a paycheck,” Biden said in a speech to the nation. “There is real pain overwhelming the real economy.”

A planned eight-minute test firing of the four engines of a new mega rocket needed for the moon missions came to an abrupt end after only about a minute.

The rocket, known as the Space Launch System, has yet to travel to space. The test was intended to simulate what the engines would do during an actual launch.

As engineers disentangle what went wrong, the first launch of the rocket is likely to slip further into the future, and NASA astronauts may have to wait longer before setting foot on the moon again.

NASA officials, however, said that it was too early to predict delays, if any. “I don’t think at this point that we have enough information to know,” Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference after the test. “It depends what the anomaly was and how challenging it’s going to be to fix it.”

Saleh, 41, who is of Lebanese descent, is the fourth coach of color slated to lead an N.F.L. team in 2021, with five openings still to be filled.

Saleh’s hiring came several months after the league updated the Rooney Rule, which aims to increase diversity in candidacies for head coaching jobs and certain front office roles. 

Joe Horrigan, a former executive director and historian at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, could not recall any head coaches before Saleh identifying as a Muslim and Arab; neither could Matthew Jaber Stiffler, who leads research at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

“To have somebody in a visible position, who is proudly Arab, proudly Muslim—but that also he’s just a football coach too, when it comes down to it—it helps to just normalize the experience of Muslim Americans,” he said of Saleh.

It’s the first time that the Girl Scouts, who have sold cookies for more than a century, have collaborated with a national delivery service, the organization said.

For decades, cookie stands, stacked with boxes of Samoas, Thin Mints, and Trefoils, have been ubiquitous outside supermarkets and in other high-traffic areas. So have direct sales pitches from parents of Girl Scouts to their colleagues at work.

But then the pandemic hit—drastically limiting direct contact. So the Girl Scouts got creative.

“We’re proud of the resourceful ways Girl Scouts are running their cookie businesses safely and using their earnings to make the world a better place,” Judith Batty, the interim chief executive officer of the Girl Scouts, said in a statement. “This season, our girls will continue to exemplify what the cookie program taught them—how to think like entrepreneurs, use innovative sales tactics, and pivot to new ways of doing business when things don’t go according to plan.”