Weekly News Quiz for Students

It was a pleasant 86 or so degrees in Plains, Georgia, when President Biden and Jill Biden visited former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, at their home on April 29.

Jill Biden is 5-foot-6. Jimmy Carter, 96, stood around 5-foot-10 at his tallest. But even kneeling, she appeared to dwarf him. And Joe Biden, who is six feet tall, seemed to hover above the man he had come to pay his respects to. It was as if the hosts had been turned into Hobbits.

The answer can be found in Carter’s gigantic shoes, said Pete Souza, a former chief official White House photographer for President Barack Obama. Compared to the rest of him they look huge.

“That to me is an indication that the foreground was distorted by a super-wide-angle lens,” he said.

Such lenses can be helpful when a photographer is trying to shoot several people in a small room and cannot get far back enough to get everyone in the same frame with another lens. But they are notorious for distorting proportions, Souza said.

The gruesome attack underscored fears about the nation’s future after the impending American troop withdrawal.

The blasts—and the targeting of girls as they left the Sayed Ul-Shuhada high school—came as rights groups and others were expressing alarm that the American troop withdrawal would leave women, and their educational and social gains, particularly vulnerable.

The hope surrounding the U.S. deal with the Taliban on the troop withdrawal was that it might open the way for a lasting cease-fire and a respite for civilians who are being killed in horrific numbers. But the reality, as American troops depart, is being driven home by massacres like the one on May 8—there has been more chaos than accord, and more fear than hope.

The F.D.A.’s decision, announced May 10, presents a new opportunity in the push for broad immunity against the coronavirus in the United States, but the challenges are more daunting than for immunizing older, more independent teenagers.

A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Vaccine Monitor found that many parents—even those who eagerly got their own Covid shots—are reluctant to vaccinate younger teens. Yet doing so will be critical for further reducing transmission of the virus, smoothly reopening middle and high schools, and regaining some sense of national normalcy.

While the shutdown has so far had little impact on supplies of gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel, some energy analysts warned that a prolonged suspension could raise prices at the pump along the East Coast and leave some smaller airports scrambling for jet fuel.

Colonial Pipeline, the pipeline operator, said on May 9 that it was developing “a system restart plan” and would restore service to some small lines between terminals and delivery points but “will bring our full system back online only when we believe it is safe to do so.”

The company, which shut down the pipeline on May 7, acknowledged on May 8 that it had been the victim of a ransomware attack by a criminal group, meaning that the hacker may hold the company’s data hostage until it pays a ransom.

It’s B. The other countries shown on the map: A is Venezuela; C is Peru; and D is Bolivia.

On May 5, after seven days of marches and clashes that turned parts of Colombian cities into battlefields, demonstrators breached protective barriers around the nation’s Congress, attacking the building before being repelled by the police.

The Colombian government has responded to the protests with the same militarized police force it often uses against rebel fighters and organized crime.

This explosion of frustration in Colombia, experts say, could be a warning of unrest across Latin America, where several countries face a combustible mix of an unrelenting pandemic, growing hardship, and plummeting government revenue.

Facebook’s Oversight Board, which acts as a quasi-court over the company’s content decisions, ruled the social network was right to bar Trump after the insurrection in Washington in January, saying he “created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible.” The panel said that ongoing risk “justified” the move.

But the board also kicked the case back to Facebook and its top executives. It said that an indefinite suspension was “not appropriate” because it was not a penalty defined in Facebook’s policies and that the company should apply a standard punishment, such as a time-bound suspension or a permanent ban. The board gave Facebook six months to make a final decision on Trump’s account status.

That angered both Republicans and Democrats. Republican lawmakers have pointed to Trump’s ouster by Facebook, Twitter, and others as evidence of an alleged anti-conservative campaign by tech companies, calling the decisions a dangerous precedent for censorship of political figures. Democrats, also dissatisfied with the murky decision, took aim at how Facebook can be used to spread lies. But scholars who support free speech welcomed the decision, saying that it draws attention to the way Facebook’s content policies are enforced. 

For decades, Bill and Melinda Gates have been powerful forces on the world stage, their vast charitable contributions affording them access to the highest levels of government, business, and the nonprofit sector. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of some $50 billion, has had immense influence in fields like global health and early-childhood education, and has made great strides in reducing deaths caused by malaria and other infectious diseases. Over the past year, the couple have been especially visible, regularly commenting on the worldwide fight against Covid-19 as their foundation spent more than $1 billion to combat the pandemic.

“After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage,” the couple said in a statement that was posted to Twitter.

They went on to say that they had “built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives” and that they “continue to share a belief in that mission,” but they “no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives.”

It said most of the debris had burned up on re-entry. It was not immediately clear whether any of what remained had landed on any of the Maldives’s 1,192 islands, located in the Indian Ocean, roughly 400 miles from India.

The possibility, however slight, that debris from the rocket could strike a populated area had led people around the world to track its trajectory for days.

The rocket, a Long March 5B, launched the main module of China’s next space station, Tiangong, on April 29. Usually, the large booster stages of rockets immediately drop back to Earth after they are jettisoned, but the 23-ton core stage of the Long March 5B accompanied the space station segment all the way to orbit.

Because of friction caused by the rocket rubbing against air at the top of the atmosphere, it soon began losing altitude, making what is called “uncontrolled re-entry” back to Earth inevitable.

Broadway shows are not planning performances until September or later.

Why the four-month wait? With as many as eight shows a week to fill, and the tourists who make up an important part of their customer base yet to return, producers need time to advertise and market. They need to reassemble and rehearse casts who have been out of work for more than a year. And they need to sort out and negotiate safety protocols.

But the biggest reason is more gut-based: Individually and collectively, they are trying to imagine when large numbers of people are likely to feel comfortable traveling to Times Square, funneling through cramped lobbies and walking down narrow aisles to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. Most Broadway shows lose money even in the best of times, so producers say there is no way they can afford to reopen with social distancing, given the industry’s high labor and real estate costs.