Weekly News Quiz for Students

That sets up a potential sale of leases just before Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, leaving the new administration of Joe Biden, who has opposed drilling in the refuge, to try to reverse them after the fact.

The Arctic refuge is one of the last vast expanses of wilderness in the United States, 19 million acres that for the most part are untouched by people, home instead to wandering herds of caribou, polar bears, and migrating waterfowl. It has long been prized, and protected, by environmentalists, but President Trump has said that opening part of it to oil development was among the most significant of his efforts to expand domestic fossil fuel production.

The scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, believed to be 59, has been considered the driving force behind Iran’s nuclear weapons program for decades, according to American intelligence assessments and Iranian nuclear documents.

Israel is thought to be behind the assassination. It was unclear how much the United States may have known about the operation in advance, but the two nations are the closest of allies and have long shared intelligence regarding Iran. The White House and the C.I.A. have declined to comment.

Fakhrizadeh’s killing could have broad implications for the incoming Biden administration, potentially complicating the plan to revive the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, as Biden has pledged to do.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The order was the first in which the court’s newest member, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, played a decisive role.

The court’s ruling was at odds with earlier ones concerning churches in California and Nevada. In those cases, decided in May and July, the court allowed the states’ governors to restrict attendance at religious services.

The Supreme Court’s membership has changed since then, with Justice Barrett succeeding Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September. The vote in the earlier cases was also 5 to 4, but in the opposite direction, with Chief Justice Roberts joining Justice Ginsburg and the other three members of what was then the court’s four-member liberal wing.

In an unsigned opinion, the majority said Governor Cuomo’s restrictions violated the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion.

His spokesman, Sebastián Sanchi, said the cause was a heart attack. Maradona had undergone brain surgery several weeks ago.

In 2000, FIFA, soccer’s governing body, voted Maradona and Pelé of Brazil the sport’s two greatest players. News of the death brought an outpouring of mourning and remembrance in Argentina, becoming virtually the sole topic of conversation. Such was Maradona’s stature that the government declared three days of national mourning.

Critics of Mayor Bill de Blasio said they believed officials were placing more of a priority on economic activities like indoor dining than the well-being of New York City’s children.

Mayor de Blasio said that middle and high schools would remain closed for now, but also signaled that he would overhaul how the city manages the system during the pandemic, which has forced millions of children in the United States out of schools.

The mayor said the city would abandon a 3 percent test positivity threshold that it had adopted for closing the school system, the largest in the country, with 1.1 million children. And he said the system would aim to give many parents the option of sending their children to school five days a week, which would effectively end the so-called hybrid learning system for some city schools.

As mysteriously as it arrived, a metal monolith that was discovered last week by Utah public safety workers is now gone, officials said on Nov. 28.

The three-sided metal structure was removed on the evening of Nov. 27 “by an unknown party” from the public land it was found on, the federal Bureau of Land Management’s Utah office said in a statement.

“IT’S GONE!” the Department of Public Safety said, reacting to the news in an Instagram post. “Almost as quickly as it appeared it has now disappeared,” the department said, adding, “I can only speculate” that aliens took it back, using the emoji for extraterrestrials.

Officials said that the structure was most likely a work of art and that its installation on public land was illegal. It was unclear who had put it there—and when—but the art world quickly speculated that it was the work of John McCracken, a sculptor fond of science fiction. He died in 2011.

It’s a yearly Thanksgiving Day tradition in New York City: Millions of spectators cram onto long city blocks, hanging over barricades and balconies or press against the windows of towering office buildings to watch giant balloons, depicting cartoon characters like Pikachu, hovering just a few feet above the street.

But this year, as with everything in 2020, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a ritual marker of the holiday, was drastically different. Because of the threat of the coronavirus, much of the parade in Manhattan was scaled down on Nov. 26. The route was reduced from two miles to a single block down 34th Street, near the flagship department store.

Warnings from officials to stay home because of the pandemic kept millions indoors this year, and police barricades were put in place to ensure nobody got too close.