Weekly News Quiz for Students

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court and a pioneering advocate for women’s rights, who in her ninth decade became a much younger generation’s unlikely cultural icon, died on Sept. 18 at her home in Washington.

The cause was complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer, the Supreme Court said.

Justice Ginsburg, the Supreme Court’s feminist icon, not only changed the law, she also transformed the roles of men and women in society. Her pointed and powerful dissenting opinions earned her late-life rock stardom. Young women had her image tattooed on their arms; daughters were dressed in R.B.G. costumes for Halloween; and “You Can’t Spell Truth Without Ruth” appeared on bumper stickers and T-shirts.

Political leaders from both sides of the aisle and the chief justice of the United States offered tributes to Justice Ginsburg remembering her as a trailblazer and a warrior for justice.

The chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., said in a statement released by the court: “Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her — a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”

Mr. Trump said he expected to announce his nomination in the next week and told a campaign rally that it “will be a woman,” gambling that he can scramble the dynamics of a campaign in which he is currently trailing and at the same time seal his legacy by cementing a conservative majority on the Supreme Court with his third appointment in four years.

The president did not name his finalists, but in a telephone conversation on the night of Sept. 18 with Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, according to two people familiar with the call, Mr. Trump identified two women as candidates: Judges Amy Coney Barrett of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and Barbara Lagoa of the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.

Mr. Trump offered praise for both judges when reporters asked about them on Sept. 19 before he flew to North Carolina for his rally. He called Judge Barrett, who was a finalist for the last opening two years ago, “very highly respected” and said that while he did not know Judge Lagoa, he had heard “incredible things” about her, noting that she is Hispanic and from Miami, in the battleground state of Florida.

It is a staggering toll, almost 200,000 people dead from the coronavirus in the United States, and nearly five times that many — close to one million people — around the world.

And the pandemic, which sent cases spiking skyward in many countries and then trending downward after lockdowns, has reached a precarious point. Will countries like the United States see the virus continue to slow in the months ahead? Or is a new surge on the way?

In the United States, fewer new coronavirus cases have been detected week by week since late July, following harrowing outbreaks first in the Northeast and then in the South and the West.

But in recent days, the nation’s daily count of new cases is climbing again, fueling worries of a resurgence of the virus as universities and schools reopen and as colder weather pushes people indoors ahead of what some epidemiologists fear could be a devastating winter.

The coronavirus death toll in the United States is now roughly equal to the population of Akron, Ohio, or nearly two and a half times the number of U.S. service members who died in battle in the Vietnam and Korean Wars combined, and about 800 people are still dying daily.

It was unclear whether TikTok’s choice of Oracle as a technology partner would mean that Oracle would also take a majority ownership stake of the social media app, the people involved in the negotiations said.

Microsoft had been seen as the American technology company with the deepest pockets to buy TikTok’s U.S. operations from its parent company, ByteDance, and with the greatest ability to address national security concerns that led to Mr. Trump’s order.

“ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s U.S. operations to Microsoft,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users, while protecting national security interests.”

Astronomers on Sept. 14 reported the detection of a chemical in the acidic Venusian clouds, phosphine, which may be a possible sign of life. That has some planetary scientists itching to return to the sun’s second planet, especially those who feel Venus has long been overlooked in favor of Mars and other destinations.

“If this planet is active and is producing phosphine, and there is something that’s making it in the Venus atmosphere, then by God almighty, forget this Mars nonsense,” said Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University. “We need a lander, an orbiter, we need a program.”

The agreement settled a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by the young woman’s family. As her mother, her lawyers and leading activists walked into the council chamber alongside the mayor, there was a momentary show of unity, after months of nightly, sometimes violent demonstrations that have left Kentucky’s largest city boarded up. It comes six months after the death of Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, in a botched drug raid, but before the state’s attorney general has said whether the officers involved in the shooting would be criminally charged — a key demand of protesters.

“My administration is not waiting to move ahead with needed reforms to prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again,” Mayor Greg Fischer said. “When you know what the right thing to do is you do it. Why wait?”

The agreement, which did not require the city to acknowledge wrongdoing, was sizable, with her family receiving more than double the amount paid to the relatives of Eric Garner, the New York man who died in a police chokehold in 2014. While a few similar cases resulted in larger payments, from $13 million to a whopping $38 million, some of them came only after years in court battles. By contrast, the Louisville agreement was reached in just months.

“Schitt’s Creek,” a show that had its final episode in April and was created by Daniel Levy with his father, the actor and writer Eugene Levy, won all the comedy awards during the Sept. 20 telecast. The comedy sweep was an Emmys first, according to a Television Academy spokesman.

HBO ended up winning 30 awards overall, the most of any network or streaming platform, thanks, in part, to “Watchmen,” the ambitious mini-series that picked up 11 awards, including the one for best limited series.

Another of the night’s surprises: Zendaya, 24, became the youngest person to win best actress in a drama for her role in HBO’s “Euphoria.”

The Big Ten Conference, one of the wealthiest and most powerful leagues in college sports, had been besieged for weeks to reverse its policy not to play football this fall because of the coronavirus pandemic. But as recently as last week, many of the university leaders behind the league’s most consequential decisions were skeptical of altering their approach.

Then came a new series of conversations with the league’s medical advisers, who had kept deliberating even after they led the conference’s presidents and chancellors to conclude overwhelmingly last month that the pandemic made it too risky to play until at least 2021. By the morning of Sept. 16, the league’s 14 universities, including athletic powerhouses like Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State, had unanimously agreed to try to play football as soon as Oct. 23, but without fans in the stadiums.

The turnabout fed debate over whether political interference and the allure of enormous broadcast contracts — not to mention the envy-inducing sight of other college and professional sports leagues filling the airwaves with their own games — had led the university leaders to surrender. But some top players welcomed the decision, and Big Ten leaders insisted that they had reconsidered because of, not in spite of, medical advice.

The Times reported on Sept. 16:

Michael R. Caputo, the embattled top spokesman of the cabinet department overseeing the coronavirus response, will take a leave of absence “to focus on his health and the well-being of his family,” the Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday.

Mr. Caputo’s science adviser, Dr. Paul Alexander, will be leaving the department.

The announcement came after a bizarre and inflammatory Facebook outburst on Sept. 13 and disclosures that he and his team had tried to water down official reports of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention about the pandemic.

Mr. Caputo, a long-time Trump loyalist and the Department of Health and Human Services’s assistant secretary of public affairs, had apologized for his Facebook presentation to his staff and to Alex M. Azar II, the department’s leader, after his comments became public.

“‘Although we have been hard at work for decades, we still have yet to unlock the secret of how a human being could summon the mental fortitude to stay focused on a 1-0 baseball game for hours at a time,’ said project lead Vanessa Herrera, who explained that by discovering the special neural connections that these select individuals clearly possess, scientists could finally unlock the full potential of the human mind,” writes The Onion.