Weekly News Quiz for Students

Last week, over the course of two days, a racially diverse jury of seven women and five men deliberated for about 10 hours before pronouncing a former police officer, Derek Chauvin, guilty on all three charges stemming from Floyd’s death during an arrest last May: second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter.

The verdict could send Chauvin to prison for decades. Many political and civil rights leaders spoke about the significance of the moment in light of the fact that it has been relatively rare for police officers to be found guilty on charges of wrongdoing involving violent arrests of Black Americans.

Experts say those numbers in India, however staggering, represent just a fraction of the real reach of the virus’s spread, which has thrown this country into emergency mode.

Under increasing pressure to address the devastating surge of the coronavirus, the Biden administration said that it had removed impediments to the export of raw materials for vaccines and would also supply India with therapeutics, rapid diagnostic test kits, ventilators, and personal protective gear.

“Just as India sent assistance to the United States as our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, the United States is determined to help India in its time of need,” Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said in a statement on Sunday.

“Nomadland,” Chloé Zhao’s meditation on grief and the damaged American dream, won Academy Awards for best picture, director, and actress at April 25’s surreal ceremony, a stage show broadcast on television about films mostly distributed on the internet.

It was a sleepy event until the final minutes, when academy voters served up a dramatic twist ending: Anthony Hopkins, 83, won the best actor Oscar, beating out the late Chadwick Boseman, who was the runaway favorite going into the night, having been lauded by film organizations and critics’ groups for months.

It’s B. The other countries shown on the map: A is Ivory Coast; C is Ethiopia; and D is Tanzania.

Gunshots rang out in the capital of Chad on April 19 into early April 20 as supporters of the president, Idriss Déby, fired in the air celebrating the announcement that after three decades of iron-fisted rule, he had just won a sixth term.

Meanwhile, Déby was dying on a battlefield north of the capital, Ndjamena, of wounds sustained while fighting rebels trying to overthrow his government, his military generals said.

The death of Déby, who tolerated no dissent and was feared by his own people, could spark a battle for succession and leave a gaping hole in a country heavily relied upon by the West in its wars against Islamist extremists in West and Central Africa.

Chad is a desert nation three times the size of California, surrounded on all sides by countries facing serious instability, like Libya, to the north, and Nigeria to the southwest. Its military forces have been a key to both the war in the Sahel, a vast stretch of territory to the south of the Sahara, and the fight against Boko Haram and its splinter groups in the Lake Chad region.

Biden was the first American president to make such an announcement, breaking with predecessors who did not wish to anger Turkey, a NATO ally and a strategically pivotal country straddling Europe and the Middle East.

The announcement carries enormous symbolic weight, equating the anti-Armenian violence with atrocities on the scale of those committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia, and Rwanda.

Use of the term is a moral slap at President Tayyip Recep Erdogan of Turkey, a fervent denier of the genocide. He has been furious with other leaders, including Pope Francis, for describing the Armenian killings that way.

Apple’s iOS 14.5 software update for iPhones and iPads includes a new privacy tool, called App Tracking Transparency, which could give us more control over how our data is shared.

Here’s how it works: When an app wants to follow our activities to share information with third parties such as advertisers, a window will show up on our Apple device to ask for our permission to do so. If we say no, the app must stop monitoring and sharing our data.

The Supreme Court ruled on April 22 that judges need not determine that juvenile offenders are beyond hope of rehabilitation before sentencing them to die in prison. The decision appeared to signal the end of a trend that had limited the availability of severe punishments for youths who commit crimes before they turn 18.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling, said it was enough that the sentencing judge exercised discretion rather than automatically imposing a sentence of life without parole.

Over the past 16 years, the court, often led by Justice Anthony Kennedy, methodically limited the availability of the harshest penalties for crimes committed by juveniles, first by striking down the juvenile death penalty and then by restricting sentences of life without the possibility of parole.

Addressing 40 world leaders at the start of a two-day summit about the U.S. return to the Paris climate agreement, Biden sought to galvanize other countries to take more aggressive steps.

In rapid succession, Japan, Canada, Britain, and the European Union committed to steeper cuts. But China, India, and Russia made no new emissions promises, and even Biden’s commitment to cut U.S. greenhouse gases 50 percent to 52 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade will be extraordinarily difficult to meet, economically and politically.