Weekly News Quiz for Students

In his inaugural address, President Biden said it was time to heal the wounds of a divided nation still reeling from the violent attack on the Capitol just two weeks before. Together, he said, Americans would defeat the coronavirus that has killed more than 400,0000 people in the U.S. and bring the country out of its worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. 

Moments earlier, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had administered the oath of office to Biden, who placed his hand on a Bible that has been in his family for 128 years.

Vice President Kamala Harris was sworn in by Justice Sonia Sotomayor a few minutes before Biden. Harris thus became the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States and the first Black American and first person of South Asian descent to hold the nation’s second highest office.

Two of Biden’s predecessors, Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump, were not present at the inauguration. Trump was the first sitting president to skip his successor’s inaugural since Andrew Johnson in 1869.

Biden’s first actions as president dismantled several of the Trump administration’s policies. The executive orders aim to strengthen protections for young immigrants, stop construction of the border wall with Mexico, end a travel ban on people from several majority-Muslim nations, re-enter the Paris climate accords, and prioritize racial equity.

The move was the Trump administration’s final action on China and is the culmination of a yearslong debate over how to punish what many consider Beijing’s worst human rights abuses in decades. Relations between the countries have deteriorated over the past four years, and experts say China will be the greatest challenge for any U.S. administration for years to come.

The determination of atrocities is a rare action on the part of the State Department and could lead the U.S. to impose more sanctions against China. President Biden said last year that Beijing’s policies amounted to genocide.

Since 2017, Chinese security forces have sent hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and Kazakhs—possibly a million or more by some estimates—to indoctrination camps intended to instill loyalty to the Communist party. Former inmates and their families who have left China have described harsh living conditions, crude indoctrination, and abusive guards.

Playing for 23 seasons, all but his final two years with the Braves in Milwaukee and then Atlanta, Aaron was among the greatest all-around players in baseball history and one of the last major league stars to have played in the Negro leagues.

But his pursuit of Ruth’s record of 714 home runs proved a deeply troubling affair beyond the pressures of the ball field. When he hit his 715th home run, on the evening of April 8, 1974, against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, he prevailed in the face of hate mail and even death threats spewing outrage that a Black man could supplant a white baseball icon.

Experts say that as staggering as that 25-million-person figure is, it significantly understates the true number of people in the country who have been infected and the scope of the nation’s failure to contain the spread of the virus.

The official tally works out to about one in every 13 people in the country, or about 7.6 percent of the population.

“Twenty-five million cases is an incredible scale of tragedy,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who called the coronavirus pandemic one of the worst public health crises in history.

As a result, deaths in the country have also inexorably risen, with more than 414,000 linked to the virus. That’s one death out of roughly every 800 people in the country.

The College Board announced it would scrap the SAT subject tests as well.

The move comes as the testing industry has been battered by questions about equity and troubled by logistical and financial challenges during the coronavirus pandemic.

Critics saw the changes not as an attempt to streamline the test-taking process for students, as the College Board portrayed the decision, but as a way of placing greater importance on Advanced Placement tests, which the board also produces, as a way for the organization to remain relevant and financially viable.

The main SAT, taken by generations of high school students applying to college, consists of two sections, one for math and the other for reading and writing. But since at least the 1960s, students have also had the option of taking subject tests to show their mastery of subjects like history, languages, and chemistry. Colleges often use the tests to determine where to place students for freshman courses, especially in the sciences and languages. But the College Board said the subject tests have been eclipsed by the rise of Advanced Placement exams.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is a fierce advocate of fair wages and a former presidential candidate who lost the Democratic nomination to now-President Biden. And thanks to his practical clothing choices he is also now the center of a seemingly endless flood of altered pictures that dominated some corners of the internet in the hours after Biden’s socially distanced inauguration on Jan. 20.

Amid the dark suits and bright coats dotting the Capitol steps, Sanders was photographed sitting masked, cross-legged, and bundled up in a bulky coat and mittens against the frigid weather in Washington, D.C. Soon after, the image began to circulate on social media inserted into a wide array of photographs and scenes from movies and artworks.

Along the way, the autobiographical song kicked up tabloid and social media speculation as listeners tried to piece together its real-life parallels as if it were a track by Rodrigo’s hero, Taylor Swift. TikTok videos led to blog posts, which led to streams, which led to news articles, and back around again. The feedback loop made it unbeatable.

“Drivers License” was released across platforms and with a broody music video on Jan. 8 by Geffen Records. The song was then streamed more than 76.1 million times in the United States for the week, according to Billboard.

“It’s been the absolute craziest week of my life,” Rodrigo, who really did get her driver’s license last year, said in an interview. “My entire life just, like, shifted in an instant.”