Friday, Feb. 25 News Quiz of the Week: Full Tonto, Fabergé

On Nov. 26, 1939, the Russian village of Mainila near the Finnish border was bombed by members of the NKVD – predecessors to the KGB. The attack was used as an excuse to launch an invasion into Finland that would later become known as the Winter War. Finland’s President, Sauli Niinistö, on Feb. 19, 2022, compared the pre-Winter War period in Finland to the current situation in Ukraine. According to Niinisto, soviet leader Joseph Stalin thought he would divide the Finnish people to take over Finland.

Did Russia fake an excuse to invade Ukraine?

On Feb. 18, 2022, the press service of the “People’s Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic” – a separatist pro-Russian group in Ukraine – published a fake video claiming to show a sabotage operation targeting chlorine tanks in Donetsk. The soundtrack of shooting and explosions was found to be recorded in 2010 during a Finnish military exercise. The film’s creators appear to have lifted the original Finnish video from the internet. On Feb. 22, members of Russia’s Federation Council voted unanimously to allow Putin to use military force outside the country — effectively formalizing a Russian military deployment to Ukraine’s rebel regions.

When someone goes “full tonto” in English slang, he’s acting like a lunatic. The term, a former name of various subgroups of the Apache people, literally means “foolish” in Spanish. UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said on Feb. 23, 2022, that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had gone “full tonto” over Ukraine by invading it. Wallace told British soldiers that the British army “kicked the backside of Tsar Nicholas I in 1853 in Crimea and can always do it again.” Russian troops launched their attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Colombia’s Green Wave movement to decriminalize abortion had a winning moment on Feb. 22, 2022, when Colombia’s top Constitutional Court ruled that abortion is no longer a crime under Colombian law. The court’s decision decriminalizes abortions in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in Sept. 2021, and Argentina’s Congress legalized the procedure in late 2020.

Norway won a record 37 medals in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics – the most for one country at a single Winter Games. That’s five more than Russia, which finished second in the medals count. Norway’s 16 gold medals easily passed Germany’s 12. Norway’s first and last medals were won by the same athlete, Therese Johaug, who captured the Games’ first gold in the women’s skiathlon and their final one in the women’s 30-kilometer freestyle race hours before the closing ceremony.

Arthur – the longest-running children’s animated series on American television – ended its 25 years and more than 250 episodes run on PBS on Feb. 21, 2022. The series’s final episode provides viewers a glimpse of what Arthur and his friends grow up to be. The Arthur characters will live on in a new podcast, games, and digital shorts, while reruns of the series will continue on PBS Kids.

Pictured is The Basket of Flowers Egg – one of 57 surviving jeweled eggs created by the jewelry firm House of Fabergé, in Saint Petersburg, during the rule of the Russian Empire. Emperor Nicholas II gave the Basket of Flowers Egg to his wife, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, on Easter Day, Apr. 1, 1901. British Consort Queen Mary acquired the Egg in 1933.

Was The Basket of Flowers Egg stolen?

Oh no. But a replica of the famed Fabergé egg was one of £150,000 worth of items taken during an overnight raid on Netflix’s The Crown production site near Doncaster in Feb. 2022. The multi-award-winning show is currently shooting its fifth season and will air at the end of 2022.

Queen Elizabeth II, 95, tested positive for COVID-19 on Feb. 20, 2022, and experienced mild, cold-like symptoms. Queen Margrethe of Denmark, 82, and Spain’s King Felipe VI, 54, tested positive earlier in February and had mild symptoms. Additionally, the queen’s eldest son Prince Charles, 73, and her 74-year-old daughter-in-law Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, contracted COVID-19 earlier this month.

Donald Trump’s new social media platform, Truth Social, promises free speech (unlike other social platforms that banned the ex-president). That doesn’t stop its terms of use from prohibiting not only to “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site,” but also “excessive use of capital letters.” The new platform also bans specific user names.

What’s Truth Social?

Donald Trump’s new social media venture, Truth Social, launched Feb. 20, 2022, in Apple’s App Store, potentially marking the former president’s return to social media after being banned from several platforms in 2021. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube banned Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol after he was accused of posting messages inciting violence. While having technical and other difficulties in its post-launch days, Truth Social should be fully operational by the end of March 2022.

The Stem Player is Kanye West’s $200 streaming music device, enabling users to manipulate any song using touch-sensitive light sliders embedded in its shell. The 44-year-old rapper, who has legally changed his name to Ye, posted a teaser for the second part of his album Donda, which was to be released on Feb. 22, 2022. Ye announced the album would “only” be released on his “own” platform, Stem Player.

What happened on Feb. 22, 2022?

When the date came, the rapper posted a direct link on social media, giving fans access to a live stream of his Miami “Donda 2 listening and Donda 1 performance” event – many complained that they couldn’t hear or see. Four songs from the album were finally made available on Feb. 23, 2022, and additional songs were included in later updates,

The Emancipator was America’s first newspaper dedicated to ending slavery, founded in 1820 in Tennessee. A joint effort by Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research and The Boston Globe revives the historical publication and reimagines it on digital platforms. The new online Emancipator will feature written and video opinion pieces, multimedia series, and virtual talks to “reframe” the national conversation around racial injustice. Take a peek.