Weekly News Quiz for Students

After spending three days in the hospital, President Trump returned to the White House on Oct. 5. While standing on the White House balcony, he ripped off his face mask in a widely-watched television moment. He later addressed the nation, dismissing the pandemic and telling Americans not to be afraid of the virus. Just hours before, his press secretary and two more aides had tested positive for Covid-19. According to an internal government memo, 34 White House staffers and other contacts were infected in total.

Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris sat a dozen feet apart on Oct. 7, separated by plexiglass for a 90-minute debate. Harris wanted to talk about President Trump. Pence wanted to talk about Joe Biden. And neither had much interest in answering any of the questions posed by the moderator—or by the other candidate—leading to a mostly staid series of two-minute answers. But, in contrast to the presidential debate on Sept. 29, which descended into shouting and name calling, it was a much more polite back and forth.

Storming the State Capitol. Instigating a civil war. Abducting a sitting governor ahead of the presidential election.

Those were among the plots described by federal and state officials in Michigan on Oct. 8 as they announced terrorism, conspiracy, and weapons charges against 13 men. At least six of them, officials said, had hatched a detailed plan to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who has become a focal point of anti-government views and anger over coronavirus control measures.

The Lakers toppled the Heat, four games to two, to finish off their playoff run inside the N.B.A. bubble. The game lacked spectators, aside from a few of the players’ family members and friends.

Seattle’s title win—which was cemented by the largest margin of victory in finals history (33 points)—capped a 6-0 run through the playoffs. 

The Nobel committee said that work by the World Food Program, a United Nations agency, to address hunger had laid the foundations for peace in nations ravaged by war.

“In the face of the pandemic, the World Food Program has demonstrated an impressive ability to intensify its efforts,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said as she announced the prize in Oslo. “The combination of violent conflict and the pandemic has led to a dramatic rise in the number of people living on the brink of starvation,” she added.

As the global fallout from the pandemic began this spring, the World Food Program estimated that the number of people experiencing life-threatening levels of food insecurity could more than double this year, to 265 million.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the committee’s chairman, left little doubt about where the proceedings were heading, gaveling open “the hearing to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.” Republicans hold 53 of 100 Senate seats and they believe they have the votes to confirm Barrett without any support from Democrats.

Democrats arrived ready to go on the offensive. They portrayed Judge Barrett’s nomination as an election-season power grab by President Trump and Republicans after the Republican-controlled Senate in 2016 blocked then-President Barack Obama’s high court nominee, Merrick B. Garland, because, the senators said at the time, voters should have a say first when there’s a vacancy during an election year.

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 87, in September created the open seat that Barrett is seeking.

The change drastically hardens earlier policies outlined by the social media company. In August, Facebook unveiled its first attempt to limit the spread of QAnon, a far-right conspiracy movement, by establishing policies that barred QAnon groups that called for violence. 

But hundreds of other QAnon groups and pages continued to spread on the platform, and the effort was considered a disappointment in many circles, including among Facebook employees.

On Oct. 6, Facebook acknowledged that its previous policies had not gone far enough in addressing the issue.

The T. rex skeleton, nicknamed Stan, closed the 20th Century Evening Sale, nearly quadrupling its high estimate of $8 million to bring in $31.8 million. It’s rare that paleontologists find Tyrannosaur fossils as complete as Stan, and even rarer that such skeletons appear on the market. The last time a comparable specimen came to auction was in 1997, when a T. rex named Sue sold for $8.36 million—or nearly $13.5 million today, given the rate of inflation—to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.