Quick hits
• Scattering of boos: John McCain, speaking on the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination Friday outside the Memphis hotel where King was slain, said he was wrong to vote a quarter century ago against a federal holiday in memory of the civil rights leader.
• Sufficient mediocrity: California’s eighth-graders write well enough to convey information, but their words and sentence structures “are often simple and unvaried,” according to the latest state-by-state writing test, known as the Nation’s Report Card.
Numbers
• $6 billion: Amount in tax breaks that would help the home-building industry under a proposal being debated in the U.S. Senate this week.

