Week seven

Week seven

A prize of hope from the White Helmets

Nov 24, 2016

By Chris Bell, UGC and Social News team

Every day in Syria, volunteer rescue workers from the White Helmets rush to the scenes of bombings to pull people out from under the rubble and carry them to safety. Their courageous and selfless work has given hope to millions of civilians.The White Helmets are an unlikely group of heroes. These former tailors, bakers, teachers and other ordinary Syrians banded together in 2013 to save the lives others were working so hard to take. They have now saved more than 78,529 lives. But for the work they do, White Helmet volunteers and their civil defence centres are often targeted. Russian and Syrian regime planes bomb civilians, and then they circle back bomb the rescue workers and medical workers who come to help.Together let’s help replace the rescue equipment and ambulances that they’ve lost in the bombings. Let’s buy them diggers so they can pull heavy concrete slabs off of survivors buried in the rubble. Let’s provide medical care for wounded White Helmets and look after the families of the 154 volunteers killed in the line of duty.Please help us raise enough money from around the world so that every White Helmet knows their work is powered by great love and support from people around the world.

In a statement to the BBC, the White Helmets acknowledged the involvement of two of their volunteers but said the video had not been sanctioned by the group's leadership team."The video and the related posts were recorded by RFS media with Syria Civil Defence (White Helmets) volunteers, who hoped to create a connection between the horror of Syria and the outside world, using the viral Mannequin Challenge," the statement read."This was an error of judgement, and we apologise on behalf of the volunteers involved."The video was not shared on our official channels, and we took immediate action to discipline those involved and prevent incidents such as this from happening again."Our volunteers are committed to saving lives by responding to, and reporting, war crimes in Syria."This leaves us open to attacks, not just from the bombs but from those who seek to silence us for telling the truth."A spokesman for the RFS told the BBC that the activist group occasionally used this kind of campaign to help shine a spotlight on the suffering of millions of ordinary Syrians.He pointed out that in the past it had attempted to raise awareness of the conflict by leveraging the popularity of computer game Pokemon Go and comic-book heroes The Avengers.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-38066791
https://peoplesmillion.whitehelmets.org/donate/peoples-million

Structure of the Lead：

     WHO-White Helmets

     WHEN-Nov 24, 2016

     WHAT-critics had long claimed that the organisation fabricates reports and rescues

     WHY-White Helmets wanted to raise awareness of the suffering of the Syrian people, while people thought that it was not appropriate for them to do so.

     WHERE-Syria

     HOW-a video about they are performing their version of the Mannequin Challenge

Keywords：

   1.regime:(n.)政體、政權

   2. slab:(v.)切成厚板、以平板蓋上

   3. sanction:(v.)支持、鼓勵

   4. campaign:(n.)活動、戰役

   5.leverage:(n.)影響力

Week eight

Brexit’: Explaining Britain’s Vote on European Union Membership

Update: Britain has voted to exit the European Union. It is a historic decision sure to reshape the nation’s place in the world. For more about the fallout, The Times prepared an updated explainer of the basics. 

Britain held a referendum on Thursday on whether to leave the European Union, a process often referred to as “Brexit.”

The reasons for and against

Those who favor leaving argue that the European Union has changed enormously over the last four decades with regard to the size and the reach of its bureaucracy, diminishing British influence and sovereignty.

Those who want to stay say that a medium-size island needs to be part of a larger bloc of like-minded countries to have real influence and security in the world, and that leaving would be economically costly.

Who is arguing to stay, and who to go?

REMAIN Prime Minister David Cameron leads the “Remain” camp, and he could lose his job if his effort fails. Behind him are most of the Conservative government he leads, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party, which is strongly pro-Europe.

Most independent economists and large businesses favor staying in, as do the most recent heads of Britain’s intelligence services. President Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Xi Jinping of China also want Britain to stay in.

LEAVE The “Leave” camp is led by Michael Gove, the justice minister, and Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London. Nearly half the Conservative members of Parliament favor leaving, as do the members of the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, and its leader, Nigel Farage. Their main issues are sovereignty and immigration.

Abroad, the French National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, favors Brexit, as do other anti-Europe parties in Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere.

What impact would an exit have on Britain’s economy?

This is an essential and divisive question. The economic effect of an exitwould depend on what settlement was negotiated, especially on whether Britain would retain access to the single market for duty-free trade and financial services. But that would probably require accepting freedom of movement and labor for European Union citizens, which is one of the main complaints the “Leave” camp has about bloc membership.

Most economists favor remaining in the bloc and say an exit would cut growth, weaken the pound and hurt the City of London, Britain’s financial center. Even economists who favor an exit say growth would be affected in the short and medium terms, though they also say Britain would be better off by 2030.

In late October, the chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, said that the better-than-expected 0.5 percent growth in gross domestic product in the third quarter was evidence that the British economy was able to cope with Brexit. 

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/europe/britain-european-union-brexit.html

KEYWORD

1. reshape-再成形；重新塑造；改造
2. fallout-輻射性落塵，原子塵
3. referendum-公民投票
4. bureaucracy-官僚政治
5. diminishing-減少，減小，縮減
6. sovereignty-君權，統治權
7. justice-正義；公平；正當的理由；合法
8. negotiated-談判，協商，洽談
9. bloc-(為共同目的而組成的）團體；聯盟；集團
10. gross-顯著的，十足的；嚴重的；惡劣的

Week seven

White Helmets

As the war worsens, rescue workers risk their lives on the front linesBY JARED MALSIN / GAZIANTEP, TURKEY | PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOHAMMED BADRA

In Syria, it’s been all too easy to lose the plot. Things began simply enough, another promising bud in the Arab Spring—­ordinary citizens marching peacefully against a Middle Eastern despot.
It was a heart-­lifting display, maybe a bit tardy after the movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya, but you certainly knew whom to cheer for. The good guys were in plain sight, chanting “Freedom” and “Peace” from orderly rows. Until the government forces opened fire.

But as the crowds scattered for cover and, before long, took up arms themselves, what steadily enveloped the conflict was not so much the fog of war as its miasma. Opposition to the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad shattered into more than 1,000 armed groups. The most successful gathered under the banner of jihadism, either al-Qaeda or eventually ISIS, its even more repugnant spin-off. There’s nothing to like there. Then the neighbors started in, sending guns or money or troops—Iran, Russia, Hizballah, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and finally the U.S.

All wars produce ­confusion—for chaos, nothing else comes close—but even the most brutal contests produce a glimmer of hope, or at least some sense of what is driving people to put their lives on the line. Yet to outsiders, 5½ years of revolution and war in Syria might appear to have produced mostly villains, along with refugees and numbing images of suffering on a blasted landscape that recalls Stalingrad.

Enter the White Helmets. Ordinary Syrians emerged from the dust that hangs over the rubble of cities like Aleppo, double-­timing it into some of the most dangerous places on earth to do what the world has refused to do—save Syrian lives.
In a war that seemed to have no one to pull for, here was Khaled Omar retrieving a 10-day-old baby from the boulders that had been his mother’s home, still alive after hours beneath the rubble. (Omar would live only another year; he was killed by a mortar this August.)

Here was an unnamed rescuer setting Omran Daqneesh into the bright orange seat in the back of an ambulance, encased in powdery grit and shock after yet another an airstrike. And here, safe and sound in New York City, was Raed Saleh, head of the White Helmets, working the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly but eager to return to the place where over 140 of his colleagues have perished saving what they estimate to be 60,000 of their neighbors. “At the end of the day, this is my country,” he says.

The White Helmets work across the shattered interior of Syria, wherever Assad’s aircraft roll out barrel bombs or Russian fighters direct their missiles. But more and more, that work is in Aleppo. The country’s largest city, it is where the forces of Assad and his allies are ramping up for a possibly titanic assault. As many as 300,000 people are living under siege in the city’s eastern section, which the rebels have held since the early days of the war, but are now cut off from the countryside beyond.

http://time.com/syria-white-helmets/

KEYWORD

1. bud-萌芽，未成熟的事物
2. scatter-使消散；使分散；使潰散
3. steadily-穩固地；平穩地
4. regime-政體；政權；統治（方式）
5. brutal-殘忍的，冷酷的；野蠻的；粗暴的
6. repugnant-厭惡的；反感的
7. retrieve-重新得到，收回
8. rubble-粗石；碎石；瓦礫堆
9. mortar-研缽，乳缽；臼研機
10. missiles-飛彈，導彈

(105-01) Topics for Week Seven

105-01-Week Seven

1.ISIS伊斯蘭國：Islamic State, terror attack, behead

2.白頭盔：White Helmets, save, nominated, Nobel Peace Prize

(105-01) Topics for Week Eight

105-01-Week Eight

英國脫歐：Brexit, referendum, Cameron, Farage, Johnson, leave, remain