Week2.COP21

COP21 climate change summit reaches deal in Paris

13 December 2015

A deal to attempt to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than 2˙C has been agreed at the climate change summit in Paris after two weeks of intense negotiations.

The pact is the first to commit all countries to cut carbon emissions.

The agreement is partly legally binding and partly voluntary.

Earlier, key blocs, including the G77 group of developing countries, and nations such as China and India said they supported the proposals.

President of the UN climate conference of parties (COP) and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said: "I now invite the COP to adopt the decision entitled Paris Agreement outlined in the document.

"Looking out to the room I see that the reaction is positive, I see no objections. The Paris agreement is adopted."

As he struck the gavel to signal the adoption of the deal, delegates rose to their feet cheering and applauding.

US President Barack Obama has hailed the agreement as "ambitious" and "historic", but also warned against complacency.

"Together, we've shown what's possible when the world stands as one," he said.

And although admitting that the deal was not "perfect", he said it was "the best chance to save the one planet we have".

China's chief negotiator Xie Zhenhua said the deal was not perfect. But he added that "this does not prevent us from marching historical steps forward".

Nearly 200 countries took part in the negotiations to strike the first climate deal to commit all countries to cut emissions, which would come into being in 2020.

The chairman of the group representing some of the world's poorest countries called the deal historic, adding: "We are living in unprecedented times, which call for unprecedented measures.

"It is the best outcome we could have hoped for, not just for the Least Developed Countries, but for all citizens of the world."

Structure of the Lead：

WHEN- 13 December 2015

WHAT-  The UN climate conference of parties (COP)

WHY- Attempt to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than 2˙C

WHERE-  Paris

Key words:

1. negotiation  談判
2. voluntary  自主性
3. delegate  與會代表
4. complacency  自滿
5. unprecedented  史無前例
6. outcome  結果

資料來源: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35084374

Week 1. 俄航空難

Russian plane crashes in Sinai, killing all 224 people on board

By Don Melvin and Ray Sanchez

November 1, 2015

A Russian passenger plane crashed early Saturday in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people aboard, officials said.

Russian state media reported that many of the 217 passengers on Kogalymavia Flight 9268 were Russians returning from vacation. The passenger manifest included 17 children but Russian officials said there were 25 aboard. There were seven crew members.

The cause of the crash still is unknown, but it is most likely due to a technical failure, and there is no evidence of any terrorist action, Egyptian Airports Co. chief Adel Al-Mahjoob told CNN Arabic.

The Airbus A321 had a routine check before flight, showing everything was OK to proceed, Mahjoob said.

The so-called black boxes -- the flight data recorder and voice data recorder -- have been recovered and transported to Cairo for analysis, Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Hossam Kamel said at a news conference.

"There was nothing abnormal before the plane crash," he said. "It suddenly disappeared from the radar." Air traffic control recordings did not show any distress calls, Kamel said.

The plane departed the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, near the southern tip of the Sinai, on a flight to St. Petersburg, Russia. It vanished from radar 23 minutes into the flight, at 6:20 a.m. local time.

Egypt has been battling insurgents in the Sinai aligned with the terrorist group ISIS.

Islamists militants in the Sinai linked to ISIS claimed responsibility for the crash, according to an online statement.

But Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov said the claim that terrorists brought down the plane by using an anti-aircraft missile "cannot be considered reliable," according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

German air carrier Lufthansa and Air France have decided to insurgent aircraft due to fly over the region.

"We will keep that measure in place as long as we are not sure of the circumstances and the reasons of the Metrojet crash," Lufthansa spokeswoman Bettina Rittberger said.

Structure of the Lead：

WHEN- November 1, 2015

WHAT- A Russian passenger plane crashed

WHY-The cause of the crash still is unknown

WHERE- Egypt's Sinai Peninsula

HOW- 224 passengers died in the disaster

Key words:

1. manifest  表現

2. routine  常規

3. radar  雷達

4. resort  採取

5. insurgent  叛亂

6. circumstance  環境

資料來源: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/31/middleeast/egypt-plane-crash/

Week 6 : Syrian Refugees

Australia says screening of Syrian refugees could take more than a year

Tue, Nov 24, 2015

The Australian government remained committed to resettling 12,000 Syrian refugees, but security checks could take more than a year, officials said yesterday.

Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott in September announced that the 12,000 refugees would be resettled from Middle Eastern refugee camps as quickly as possible. Abbott was replaced by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull less than a week later. The first families began arriving in Australia this month.

Australian Senator Cory Bernardi yesterday said that the Cabinet should rethink that commitment in light of the threat militants could pose as refugees in Australia. He said the recent coordinated attacks in Paris had highlighted the dangers.

However, Cabinet ministers including Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison and Australian Minister for Justice Michael Keenan stood by the decision.

Peter Shergold, coordinator-general for refugee resettlement in New South Wales, said the careful screening would hold up the resettlement process.

“I’m working on the basis that the vast majority will come next year and it will probably be over 12 or 18 months, not six months,” Shergold told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

In related news, members of the anti-Islam group Reclaim Australia organized nationwide protests over the weekend in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks.

The group’s Web site said that the protests were organized in response to the shock of recent atrocities of “Islam’s radicals” both inside and outside of Australia.

Structure of the Lead：

WHO-  Australian government

WHEN- Tue, Nov 24, 2015

WHAT- The Australian government remained committed to resettling 12,000 Syrian refugees.

WHY- It is a serious problem have to be solved.

WHERE- Australia

HOW- No given

Key words:

1. prime: 黃金

2. rethink : 反思

3. militant: 激進的

4. coordinate: 協調的

5. atrocity: 暴行

資料來源: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2015/11/24/2003633232

Week 5 : Singles Day

Chinese consumers splurge on ‘Singles Day’ spree

Thu, Nov 12, 2015

Chinese Internet users yesterday spent billions of dollars in the planet’s biggest online shopping splurge, as “Singles Day” hit new heights, despite slowing growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

The cumulative national bill for the day-long orgy of commerce dwarfed what Americans spent online over the five-day frenzy from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday last year.

Singles Day is not a traditional Chinese festival, but e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) has been pushing Nov. 11 — a date heavy on ones — since 2009 as it looks to tap the country’s huge, and expanding, army of Internet shoppers.

At first it was marketed as an “anti-Valentine’s Day,” featuring hefty discounts to lure singletons and price-sensitive buyers.

However, with sales hitting new highs year after year, it has become a massive — and highly lucrative — business opportunity embraced by the nation’s digital retailers.

Competition for a slice of China’s online population of 668 million is turning increasingly fierce.

Alibaba kicked off this year’s mammoth event with a television spectacular at Beijing’s Water Cube Olympic swimming venue, featuring Chinese and foreign celebrities, including James Bond actor Daniel Craig, and US actor Kevin Spacey.

And the company’s efforts were paying off in spades, with shoppers splashing out more than US$10 billion in the first 14 hours of the sale.

This year’s tally had already outstripped last year’s gangbusters effort, with the last year’s total of US$9.3 billion matched a little more than 12 hours after the promotion’s midnight start.

In comparison, desktop sales for the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday in the US last year stood at US$6.56 billion, according to Internet analytics firm comScore.

“The 2015 sale has eclipsed last year’s final results in a little over half the time,” Alibaba said.

In an earlier release, Alibaba’s chief executive officer Daniel Zhang (張勇) said: “The whole world will witness the power of Chinese consumption this November 11.”

Another one of China’s main online retailers, JD.com Inc (京東), said it had completed more than 10 million transactions by 10 am. That was almost twice as many as last year’s total.

The task of putting customers’ purchases into their hands is huge. Alibaba said its logistical arm and its partners would use more than 1.7 million personnel, 400,000 vehicles, 5,000 warehouses and 200 airplanes to handle deliveries.

The event has received vocal support from the government at a time when China’s economic expansion is slowing and Beijing is trying to transform its growth model into a more sustainable one driven by consumption.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s (李克強) office phoned Alibaba chairman Jack Ma (馬雲) hours ahead of the promotion, “congratulating and encouraging the creation and achievement of the 11.11 event,” said a posting on a social media account of Tmall (天貓), the group’s business-to-consumer arm.

Chinese Internet users yesterday showed off their acquisitions — with many lamenting that they had spent far too much money.

“I can only afford to eat dirt for the next half year,” said a user on Sina Weibo (微博), with an attached screengrab of a Taobao (淘寶) app showing she had bought 42 items.

Structure of the Lead：

WHO-  Alibaba chairman Jack Ma

WHEN- Thu, Nov 12, 2015 

WHAT- Chinese Internet users  spent billions of dollars in the planet’s biggest online shopping splurge on "Singles Day".

WHY- The cumulative national bill for the day-long orgy of commerce.

WHERE- China

HOW- Featuring hefty discounts to lure singletons and price-sensitive buyers.

Key words:

1. splurge: 揮霍

2. spree: 大禮包

3. cumulative: 累積的

4. dwarf: 相形見絀

5. frenzy: 狂潮

6. lucrative: 利潤豐厚的

7. mammoth: 猛獁象

8. retailer: 零售商

9. logistical: 物流的

10. sustainable: 可持續發展的

資料來源:http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2015/11/12/2003632235

Week 4 : New Horizons

NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

July 23, 2015

NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the “habitable zone” around a sun-like star. This discovery and the introduction of 11 other new small habitable zone candidate planets mark another milestone in the journey to finding another “Earth.” 
The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone -- the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet -- of a G2-type star, like our sun. The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030.

"On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that proved other suns host planets, the Kepler exoplanet explorer has discovered a planet and star which most closely resemble the Earth and our Sun," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “This exciting result brings us one step closer to finding an Earth 2.0."Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have a good chance of being rocky.

While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.

“We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and reflect upon Earth’s evolving environment," said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who led the team that discovered Kepler-452b. "It’s awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth. That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet.”

To help confirm the finding and better determine the properties of the Kepler-452 system, the team conducted ground-based observations at the University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory, the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, and the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. These measurements were key for the researchers to confirm the planetary nature of Kepler-452b, to refine the size and brightness of its host star and to better pin down the size of the planet and its orbit.
The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The research paper reporting this finding has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

In addition to confirming Kepler-452b, the Kepler team has increased the number of new exoplanet candidates by 521 from their analysis of observations conducted from May 2009 to May 2013, raising the number of planet candidates detected by the Kepler mission to 4,696. Candidates require follow-up observations and analysis to verify they are actual planets.

Twelve of the new planet candidates have diameters between one to two times that of Earth, and orbit in their star's habitable zone. Of these, nine orbit stars that are similar to our sun in size and temperature.

“We've been able to fully automate our process of identifying planet candidates, which means we can finally assess every transit signal in the entire Kepler dataset quickly and uniformly,” said Jeff Coughlin, Kepler scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who led the analysis of a new candidate catalog. “This gives astronomers a statistically sound population of planet candidates to accurately determine the number of small, possibly rocky planets like Earth in our Milky Way galaxy.”
These findings, presented in the seventh Kepler Candidate Catalog, will be submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. These findings are derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

Scientists now are producing the last catalog based on the original Kepler mission’s four-year data set. The final analysis will be conducted using sophisticated software that is increasingly sensitive to the tiny telltale signatures of Earth-size planets.

Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Structure of the Lead：

WHO- Not given 

WHEN- July 23, 2015

WHAT- NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the “habitable zone” around a sun-like star.

WHY- It is a amazing discovery to NASA.

WHERE- Not given

HOW- These findings are derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

Key words:

1. habitable: 可居住的

2. sophisticated: 複雜的

3. orbiting: 軌道

4. automate: 自動化

5. resemble: 類似的

6. property: 屬性

資料來源:https://www.nasa.gov/…/nasa-kepler-mission-discovers-bigger…

Week 3. MERS

South Korea grapples to contain MERS as 1,369 in quarantine

By Madison Park
June 4, 2015

The World Health Organization warned that the MERS outbreak in South Korea is likely to grow, as the number of people under quarantine crept up to 1,369 on Wednesday.

The Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed five new cases -- increasing the number of people with the disease to 35. These new cases were contracted within hospitals.

So far, three people have died after contracting the respiratory virus in South Korea, the country's Health Ministry said Thursday, in the largest MERS outbreak outside Saudi Arabia.

The first case, concerning a man who returned to South Korea after traveling to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Bahrain, was reported on May 20. The person had not been ill during his travels, according to the World Health Organization.

More than 900 schools have shut to prevent the spread of the virus, according to South Korea's education ministry.

The extent of the outbreak in South Korea has taken many by surprise -- mainly because the virus has not been shown to spread easily between humans and the health care system in the country is considered to be sophisticated and modern.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye acknowledged problems in the country's early response earlier this week.

"Initial reaction for new infectious diseases like MERS is very important, but there were some insufficiency in the initial response, including the judgment on its contagiousness," she said.

More than 900 schools have shut to prevent the spread of the virus, according to South Korea's education ministry.

Structure of the Lead：

WHO- Not given 

WHEN- 2015 / 6 / 4

WHAT- The MERS outbreak in South Korea is likely to grow, as the number of people under quarantine crept up to 1,369.

WHY- The MERS is out of  control.

WHERE- South Korea   

HOW- South Korea has to resolve the problem.

Key words:

1. quarantine: 檢疫

2. crept: 躡手躡腳

3. respiratory: 呼吸系統

4. sophisticate: 深沉的

5. contagiousness: 傳染性

資料來源: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/03/world/south-korea-mers/

Week 2: Fifa corruption

Fifa corruption: Jeffrey Webb pleads not guilty in US

19 July 2015

Former Fifa Vice-President Jeffrey Webb has pleaded not guilty in connection with a massive corruption scandal in the world football governing body.

He was placed under house arrest on $10m (£6.4m) bail by a New York judge.

Mr Webb, from the Cayman Islands, is accused of accepting bribes worth millions of dollars in connection with the sale of marketing rights.

He was detained in Switzerland in May, along with six football officials, and was this week extradited to the US.

He was the only one not to contest his extradition from Switzerland and the first to appear in an American court.

He must remain at home within a 20-mile (32km) radius of the court, his movements will be monitored via an electronic tag and he has already relinquished his three passports, two of which are UK passports.

His lawyer has declined to comment.

Appearing in court wearing a dark blue business suit, a crisp white shirt and a silk tie, Mr Webb smiled at his wife, Kendra, as he walked in, accompanied by US marshals.

A giant of a man often referred to as "Mr President" in the Cayman Islands, he projected a confident air as he stood before the judge, flanked by his defence team and the US prosecutors who have mounted the case against him, and secured his extradition from Switzerland.

Mr Webb entered a plea of not guilty to charges of money-laundering, wire fraud and racketeering.

But most of the arraignment hearing at the Brooklyn courthouse was taken up with the details of his bail arrangements.

Ironically, as he was listening to the charges he faces, there was a football match being played on the grass outside the courthouse, our correspondent says.

Mr Webb, 50, has been provisionally banned as Fifa vice-president. He is also the former president of the Central and North American football federation (Concacaf).

The other six people arrested are fighting their extradition to the US, where the charges were laid.

The men were held at the request of the US Department of Justice, which has indicted a total of 14 current and former Fifa officials and associates on charges of"rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted" corruption following a major inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The investigation was initially sparked by the bidding process for the Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 World Cups, but was widened to look back at the dealings of world football's governing body over the past 20 years.

The Department of Justice's indictment says that the corruption was planned in the US, and that American banks were used to transfer money.

Structure of the Lead：

WHO-  Jeffrey Webb 

WHEN- 2015/9/19

WHAT-  Accepting bribes worth millions of dollars in connection with the sale of marketing rights. 

WHY- Not given

WHERE- New York   

HOW- Former Fifa Vice-President has pleaded not guilty in connection with a massive corruption scandal in the world football governing body.

Key words:

1. plead: 辯護

2. scandal:  醜聞

3. extradition: 引渡

4. radius: 半徑

5. monitored: 監控

6. relinquish: 放棄

7. prosecutor: 起訴人

8. fraud: 騙局

9. racketeer: 勒索

10. rampant: 橫行

資料來源:http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33582473