Summary
In our news wrap, the pandemic has pushed the United States population growth to its lowest rate since the country's founding. Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed the West for growing tensions in Eastern Europe and renewed his demands for security guarantees. Hundreds of people marched to the closed U.S. embassy in Afghanistan to demand that the country's assets be unfrozen. President Joe Biden
gave a speech
Tuesday on the omicron variant and new plans for rapid testing and planned to resurrect the Build Back Better bill.
Nearly 1,400 Kellogg employees have ratified a new contract, ending a strike of more than two months. Read more about the Kellogg cereal strike
here
. Federal prison inmates who were sent home last year due to the pandemic will not be returned to prison when the emergency ends. Classroom has a Daily News Lesson on this topic
here
.
Five Facts
Directions:
Choose one or more of the stories to record the Five Facts questions as well as the focus and media literacy questions below.
-
Who
are some of the individuals or groups of people mentioned in the news summary?
-
What
stories are covered?
-
Where
do some of the stories take place?
-
When
did those stories occur?
-
Why
did the event(s) take place?
*Bonus:
How
do you think the NewsHour's producers decided which stories made it into the news summary?
Focus Questions
What may be some of the repercussions of the U.S. hitting its lowest population rate in the nation's history?
Media literacy: What might be some other reasons why people are choosing to have less children or none at all? Do you think these reasons should have been included in the story? Are there positive aspects to having a low population rate? How could you find out, if you are not sure?
For More
"I’m now more in debt than I ever was"
"Even before the pandemic began, millennials had accumulated
$1 trillion in debt
, according to the New York Federal Reserve, and women held
nearly two-thirds
of the nation’s student loan debt. For Americans who were already saddled with debt, the most recent economic crisis further decimated their savings and made it harder to consider having children."
This excerpt is from the NewsHour story
The U.S. birth rate began dropping years before the pandemic. Here’s why
. Read the rest of the article to learn more about the U.S.'s low population rate.
