Weekly News Quiz for Students

In a brief speech at the White House, President Biden said his administration had provided support to Johnson & Johnson that would enable the company and its partners to make vaccines around the clock. The administration had also brokered a deal in which the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Company would help manufacture the new Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine.

The president’s timetable, if it comes to pass, provides a bright light at the end of a long, dark tunnel, though he acknowledged that the nation remained in a tenuous situation. The announcement on March 2 came days after the Food and Drug Administration gave Johnson & Johnson emergency authorization for its vaccine, which requires just one dose, unlike the two others that are available in the United States.

In a statement on March 2, Dr. Seuss Enterprises said that it had decided last year to end publication and licensing of the books by Theodor Seuss Geisel. The titles include his first book written under the pen name Dr. Seuss, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937).

“These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises said in a statement. The business said the decision came after working with a panel of experts, including educators, and reviewing its catalog of titles.

Pope Francis returned to the world stage in the midst of the pandemic when he arrived in Baghdad on March 5, seeking to help heal a nation uniquely wounded by violent sectarianism, foreign adventurism, and the persecution of minority populations, including Christians.

By choosing Iraq and its war-torn—and now Covid-threatened—lands as his first destination of the year, Francis plunged directly into the issues of war and peace, poverty, and religious strife in an ancient and biblical land. His trip is explicitly designed to deepen ties to Shiite Muslims and encourage a decimated Christian population.

But more broadly, it also sent the message that, after a year of being cooped up in Rome and fading from public consciousness, Francis wanted to elevate his profile and spend his time with those who have suffered the most.

“This trip is emblematic,” he said, calling it “a duty to a land martyred for many years.”

The package, which was poised to pass the House before it heads to Biden’s desk to be signed into law, is the first major legislative initiative of his presidency. The measure seeks at once to curtail the coronavirus pandemic, bolster the sluggish economy, and protect the neediest people within it. Republicans voted unanimously against it and assailed it as unnecessary and unaffordable.

It would inject vast amounts of federal resources into the economy, including one-time direct payments of up to $1,400 for hundreds of millions of Americans, jobless aid of $300 a week to last through the summer, money for distributing coronavirus vaccines, and relief for states, cities, schools, and small businesses struggling during the pandemic.

The sanctions closely mirrored a series of actions that European nations and Britain took in October and expanded on Monday. 

Senior officials said the move was part of an effort to show unity in the Biden administration’s first confrontations with the government of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. But none of the sanctions were specifically directed at Putin or the oligarchs who support the Russian leader.

The girls were taken Feb. 26 from Government Girls Secondary School in the town of Jangebe, in the northern state of Zamfara. The Nigerian government has denied paying ransoms. It was not clear how the release of the children in this case was secured.

“It gladdens my heart to announce the release of the abducted students of GGSS Jangebe from captivity,” the governor of Zamfara State, Bello Matawalle, wrote on Twitter, referring to their school’s name. Matawalle did not provide details about the girls’ release. Officials initially said that 317 girls had been in the group, but later told journalists that the correct number was 279.

The frequency of mass kidnappings of girls and boys at boarding schools in northwestern Nigeria is rising in part because abduction has become a growth industry amid the country’s economic crisis. The victims are increasingly schoolchildren—not just the rich, powerful, or famous.

A new basketball league backed by a sports media company is entering the intensifying debate over whether student-athletes should be paid, by starting a venture offering high school basketball players $100,000 salaries to skip college.

The league, Overtime Elite, formed under the auspices of the sports media company Overtime, would compete directly with the N.C.A.A. for the nation’s top high school boys by employing about 30 of them, who would circumvent the behemoth of college sports.

Overtime will offer each athlete, some as young as 16, a minimum of $100,000 annually, as well as a signing bonus and a small number of shares in Overtime’s larger business. The company will also provide health and disability insurance, and set aside $100,000 in college scholarship money for each player—in case any decide not to pursue basketball professionally.

The trade-off is major: The players who accept the deal will forfeit their ability to play high school or college basketball.

The moon, lacking an atmosphere to shield it, is constantly under attack. When meteorites bombard its volcanic surface, sodium atoms fly high into orbit. The sun’s photons collide with the sodium atoms, effectively pushing them away from the sun and creating a tail-like structure flowing downstream from the moon.

For a few days each month, when the new moon moves between Earth and the sun, this comet-like tail dusts the side of our world that is facing the sun. Our planet’s gravity pinches that sodium stream, narrowing it into a beam, invisible to the naked eye, that wraps around Earth’s atmosphere and shoots out into space from the opposite side of the planet.