Weekly News Quiz for Students

Vaccine Pause, Police Shooting, Softball First

Adapted from the Learning Network at The New York Times

Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times

1

The officer who fatally shot a Black man during a traffic stop near ___ was arrested on April 14. She mistakenly confused her gun for her Taser, police officials said, quickly releasing video as they tried to ease tensions in a state on edge over the Derek Chauvin trial.

In a brief clip of body camera video, officers from the Brooklyn Center Police Department can be seen trying to handcuff the driver, Daunte Wright. One of the officers aims a weapon at Wright and shouts, “Taser! Taser! Taser!”


The arrest of the officer, Kimberly Potter, who is white, came a day after she resigned from the department. The police chief in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, also resigned. Potter is charged with second-degree manslaughter. Hundreds of people have faced off with the police in the Minneapolis suburb each night since Wright’s death on April 11, even as the region is on edge amid the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis officer charged with killing George Floyd last May.

2

Injections of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine came to a sudden halt across the country last week after federal health agencies called for a pause in the vaccine’s use as they examine ___ that emerged in six recipients.

All six were women between the ages of 18 and 48, and all developed the illness within one to three weeks of vaccination. One woman in Virginia died, and a second woman in Nebraska was hospitalized in critical condition.


More than seven million people in the United States have received Johnson & Johnson shots so far, and another 10 million doses have been shipped out to the states, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


“We are recommending a pause in the use of this vaccine out of an abundance of caution,” Dr. Peter Marks, the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and Dr. Anne Schuchat, the principal deputy director of the C.D.C., said in a joint statement. “Right now, these adverse events appear to be extremely rare.”


The U.S. is still using two approved vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.

3

Last week, Hope Trautwein of the University of North Texas softball team ___ in N.C.A.A. Division I history.

In a seven-inning game against the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff on April 11, Hope Trautwein faced 21 batters and struck all of them out. No one even put a ball in play.


It was the first seven-inning perfect game with 21 strikeouts in N.C.A.A. Division I history.


It was also the third college no-hitter for Trautwein. More remarkable, she also struck out 21 batters in a seven-inning game on Feb. 13 at Southeastern Louisiana. But in that game she also gave up five hits, two walks, and two runs. Only two other pitchers in Division I before Trautwein have matched the 21-strikeout feat, the N.C.A.A. reported.

Jim McMahon/Mapman®

4

Raúl Castro announced on April 16 that he was handing over leadership of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party to a younger generation, leaving the island nation without a Castro in a top leadership role for the first time in over 60 years. Which country shown above is Cuba?

It’s B. The other countries shown on the map: A is Belize; C is Haiti; and D is Barbados.


Castro, who turns 90 in June, reiterated his long-anticipated intention to step down in a speech kicking off the Communist Party congress on April 16.


After serving two terms as Cuba’s president, Castro stepped down from that office in 2018, replaced by his handpicked successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez.


Since 1959, when Raúl and his older brother, Fidel, led an insurgency against an American-backed dictator to victory, Cuba has been led by a Castro. Now, as Raúl—who succeeded his older brother—steps down from the helm of the Communist Party, he leaves a country that is torn by its most brutal economic crisis in decades.

5

President Biden declared on April 14 that “it is time to ___” in Afghanistan.

President Biden said that the United States had long ago accomplished its main mission of denying terrorists a haven in Afghanistan and that leaving American forces there was no longer worth the cost in blood and money.


Speaking from the same spot in the White House where President George W. Bush ordered the start of the war after the Sept. 11 attacks nearly two decades ago, Biden made a case that there was no longer any justification—if there ever was—to believe that the United States military presence could turn Afghanistan into a stable democracy.


The roughly 2,500 American troops on the ground there, he said, will be gradually withdrawn starting on May 1, with the process complete by Sept. 11, a timetable intended to signal his determination to end a vexing chapter in American foreign policy.


Biden has been a critic of the American presence for more than a dozen years, though his concerns were often overruled when he was vice president. Now, invested with the authority to order an exit, he argued that the United States had succeeded in its one real task: ousting the terrorist group Al Qaeda and making sure that the country would never again be the launching pad for a terrorist attack on the U.S., as it was on Sept. 11, 2001.

6

President Biden on April 15 imposed extensive new sanctions on Russia for the ___.

The sanctions included measures intended to make it more difficult for Russia to take part in the global economy if it continued its campaign of disruptive actions, including in cyberspace and on the border of its neighbor Ukraine.


The measures President Biden announced included sanctions for disinformation efforts and for carrying out Moscow’s interference in the 2020 presidential election. Ten Russian diplomats, most of them identified as intelligence operatives, were expelled from the Russian Embassy in Washington.


The United States also joined with European partners to impose sanctions associated with Russia’s occupation of Crimea, the peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The sanctions came amid a large Russian military buildup on the border of Ukraine and in Crimea.


In retaliation for U.S. sanctions, on April 16 the Russian government announced that it would expel 10 American diplomats and threatened to crack down on U.S.-funded nongovernmental organizations.

Damien McFadden/ANL, via Shutterstock

7

What’s going on in this picture?

The world’s longest rabbit, Darius, has disappeared. Four feet long and weighing 50 pounds, the heavyweight bunny should be easy to spot. But he vanished this past weekend, and now the police are involved, appealing for information about his apparent abduction from his home in a small English village.


Darius’s owner, Annette Edwards, has offered a reward of 2,000 pounds, about $2,745, for his safe return, no questions asked. She detailed his disappearance on April 11 from her home in Stoulton, England, in a post on Twitter, calling it a “very sad day.” 

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