Weekly News Quiz for Students

The virus has killed more than 1,000 Americans a day in the past week, a toll that would shock the nation, were it not for the fact that people were dying twice as fast in April, when doctors knew less about how to treat them.

More than 1,380 new deaths were reported on Nov. 13 pushing the seven-day average to more than 1,090 a day. And hospitalizations for Covid-19 also set a national record on Nov. 13 for the fourth straight day, reaching 68,516, according to the Covid Tracking Project—a figure that has more than doubled in just five weeks.

Iota’s formation comes on the heels of Subtropical Storm Theta and Hurricane Eta. Bringing fatal flooding and landslides, Hurricane Eta battered parts of Central America when it made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane. Forecasters predicted Eta's damage could exacerbate Iota’s impact.

Scientists had expected an active hurricane season with up to 25 named storms. That expectation has now been exceeded, along with the record set in 2005, in which 28 storms were strong enough to be named.

Although scientists have not definitively said that global warming has led to more hurricanes, there is consensus that climate change has altered the ways in which hurricanes behave, making them more destructive.

In quick succession, President Trump lost legal battles in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan. The losses came as Biden was declared the victor in Georgia and a day after an agency in the president’s own Department of Homeland Security declared that the election “was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” any voting systems malfunctioned.

Russian peacekeeping forces were deployed to an ethnic Armenian territory in the Caucasus Mountains on Nov. 10, after a brutal, six-week-long war.

More than 1,300 soldiers had died on the Armenian side of the conflict alone since late September, when a quarter-century of tensions over the disputed area, Nagorno-Karabakh, exploded into open warfare.

Late Nov. 9, President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced that the two sides had agreed to stop the fighting in a deal that ceded more land to Azerbaijan but retained Armenian control over some of the territory, including the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh.

President Trump announced the decision on Twitter, writing in a post that Mark Esper had been “terminated.”

The president wrote that he was appointing Christopher C. Miller, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, to be the acting defense secretary. Miller will be the fourth official to lead the Pentagon under Trump.

Esper’s downfall had been expected for months, after he disagreed with Trump in June and said that active-duty military troops should not be sent to control the wave of racial justice protests in American cities.

Thirty years ago, Kim Ng started work in the game as an intern for the Chicago White Sox, attempting to carve out a career in a sport dominated by men. She worked her way up, earning senior positions with the Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers and, most recently, serving as Major League Baseball’s senior vice president for baseball operations.

“This challenge is one I don’t take lightly,” Ng said in a statement. “When I got into this business, it seemed unlikely a woman would lead a major league team, but I am dogged in the pursuit of my goals.”

The significance of Ng’s hiring extends beyond baseball, as she is the first woman to be a general manager in any of the major men’s sports leagues in North America. The move, to many in baseball, was considered long overdue and comes at a time when several other women are moving up the ranks of the sport after years of resistance, and as women begin to populate the benches and boardrooms of professional football and basketball teams.

It’s not yet the same as hopping on commuter flight from New York to Washington or renting a car from Avis, but the Nov. 15 launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station in a capsule built by SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was a momentous step toward making space travel commonplace and mundane.

In the future, instead of relying on government-operated spacecraft, NASA astronauts and anyone else with enough money can buy a ticket on a commercial rocket.

“This is truly a commercial launch vehicle,” Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said during a postlaunch news conference, “and we’re grateful to our partners at SpaceX for providing it.”