Weekly News Quiz for Students

The suspect was charged with the killings at three spas. Around Atlanta and throughout the country, officials and community leaders said it could not be ignored that most of those killed in the rampage had been of Asian descent. Officials and advocates have noted a rise in crimes against Asian-Americans during the pandemic.

Six days later, on March 22, a gunman opened fire inside a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, killing 10 people, including a police officer. Until those killings, it had been a year since there had been a large-scale shooting in a public place.

The coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford provided strong protection against Covid-19 in a large clinical trial in the United States, completely preventing the worst outcomes from the disease, according to results announced on March 22. Federal health officials from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, however, said on March 23 that the encouraging results may have been based on outdated and incomplete information about the vaccine’s effectiveness. AstraZeneca defended the data and said it would release fuller results within 48 hours.

In addition, the drug company Moderna has begun a study that will test its Covid vaccine in children under 12, including babies as young as six months, the company said on March 16.

In a separate study, Moderna is testing its vaccine in 3,000 children ages 12 to 17, and may have results for that age group by summer. The vaccine would then have to be authorized for use in children, so it would not be immediately available.

Finally, the United States plans to send millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico and Canada, the White House said March 18, a notable step into vaccine diplomacy just as the Biden administration is quietly pressing Mexico to curb the stream of migrants coming to the border.

Tens of millions of doses of the vaccine have been sitting in American manufacturing sites. While their use has already been approved in dozens of countries, including Mexico and Canada, the vaccine has not yet been authorized by American regulators.

Deb Haaland in 2018 became one of the first two Native American women elected to the House. But her new position is particularly redolent of history because the department she now leads has spent much of its history abusing or neglecting America’s Indigenous people.

Beyond the Interior Department’s responsibility for the well-being of the nation’s 1.9 million Native people, it oversees about 500 million acres of public land, federal waters off the United States coastline, a huge system of dams and reservoirs across the Western United States, and the protection of thousands of endangered species.

“A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior,” she wrote on Twitter before the vote. “Growing up in my mother’s Pueblo household made me fierce. I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”

Condé Nast, Teen Vogue’s publisher, announced the abrupt turn on March 18 in an internal email that was sent amid pressure from the publication’s staff, readers, and at least two advertisers, just two weeks after the company had appointed McCammond to the position.

McCammond, 27, established herself as a prominent political reporter last year. She covered President Biden’s campaign for Axios and was a contributor to MSNBC and NBC. In 2019, she was named the emerging journalist of the year by the National Association of Black Journalists. She would have been the third Black woman to serve as Teen Vogue’s top editor, after Lindsay Peoples Wagner and Elaine Welteroth.

Her job status became shaky days after Condé Nast named her to the position, when the offensive tweets she had posted as a teenager in 2011 resurfaced. They included comments on the appearance of Asian features, derogatory stereotypes about Asians, and slurs for gay people. McCammond had apologized for the tweets in 2019 and deleted them. Screenshots of the tweets were recirculated on social media after her hiring at Teen Vogue was announced on March 5.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joe Biden and help the re-election of  then-President Donald Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on March 16.

The declassified report represented the most comprehensive intelligence assessment of foreign efforts to influence the 2020 vote. Besides Russia, Iran and other countries also sought to sway the election, the report said. China considered its own efforts but ultimately concluded that they would fail and most likely backfire, according to intelligence officials.

One day after the spring break oasis of South Beach descended into chaos, with the police struggling to control overwhelming crowds and making scores of arrests, officials in Miami Beach decided on March 21 to extend an emergency curfew for up to three weeks.

The officials there went so far as to approve closing the famed Ocean Drive to all vehicular and pedestrian traffic from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.—the hours of the curfew—for four nights a week through April 12. Residents, hotel guests, and employees of local businesses are exempt from the closure.

The strip, frequented by celebrities and tourists alike, was the scene of a much-criticized skirmish on March 20 between sometimes unruly revelers who ignored social-distancing and mask guidelines aimed at curbing the coronavirus, and police officers who used pepper balls to disperse a large crowd just hours after the curfew was introduced.

The restrictions were a stunning concession to the city’s inability to control unwieldy crowds of revelers whom the city and the state of Florida have aggressively courted amid the continuing coronavirus pandemic.

It’s well known that the theatrical version was released after much drama: Zack Snyder found himself fighting over the creative direction of the movie with the studio, which was anxious for an “Avengers”-style hit that would be the beginning of a billion-dollar franchise.

Fed up, Snyder walked away during postproduction; Joss Whedon, who’d already been brought in to add touches of humor to the screenplay, finished the job. Although the resulting movie earned more than $650 million worldwide, it was lambasted by critics and disappointed fans. Their vocal campaign to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut persuaded HBO Max to let Snyder do just that.

It took him four years, $70 million, and hundreds of hours of shooting and editing to finally realize his vision. This isn’t simply a director’s cut. It’s an altogether different movie.

Snyder has said he never saw the version of “Justice League” that Warner Bros. released, but he is aware that most of what he’d intended to put in the film was changed or discarded. Although the broad outline—Batman, Superman, and Aquaman, among other comic book heroes, band together to defend the earth from the evil alien Steppenwolf—remained the same, Snyder’s distinctive style was made unrecognizable.

The decision was made after nine Greek letters were pressed into service last year during the record-breaking 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, which exhausted the normal list of 21 storm names prepared by the organization.

Greek letters had been used to name storms only once before, in 2005, another busy hurricane season that produced Hurricane Katrina, among others.

National Weather Service officials said the Greek alphabet got in the way of the main reason for naming storms—to help the public readily identify and track them. Many people were confused by the sounds of the Greek letters, and public attention often focused more on the use of the alphabet itself than on the destruction caused by the storms, officials said.

No injuries were reported. The Icelandic Meteorological Office said that the lava fountains were small by volcano standards, and that seismometers were not recording much turbulence.

“It’s a small eruption flowing from a small fissure,” said Páll Einarsson, a professor emeritus of geophysics at the University of Iceland. “It’s quite harmless and we don’t expect any damage, not even ash clouds that could disrupt flight traffic.”

Einarsson said experts could not predict how the eruption would evolve, but the meteorological office said on March 20 that the volcanic activity had already decreased. And it was nothing like the eruption in 2010 of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland, which spewed so much ash that it grounded flights across parts of Europe for weeks.