Ali ‘the Greatest’ dead at 74 after breathing ailment

Former world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, whose record-setting career, unprecedented flair for showmanship and controversial stands made him one of the best-known figures of the 20th century, died on Friday aged 74.

Ali’s death was confirmed in a statement issued by family spokesman Bob Gunnell late on Friday evening, a day after he was admitted to a Phoenix, Arizona-area hospital with a respiratory ailment.

The cause of death or the name of the hospital where he died were not immediately disclosed.

Ali had long suffered from Parkinson’s disease, which impaired his speech and made the once-graceful athlete almost a prisoner in his own body.

Few could argue with Ali’s athletic prowess at his peak in the 1960s. With his dancing feet and quick fists, he could — as he put it — “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”

He was the first person to win the heavyweight championship three times.

Ali was more than a colorful and interesting athlete. He spoke boldly against racism in the 1960s, as well as the Vietnam War.

During and after his championship reign, Ali met scores of world leaders and for a time, he was considered the most recognizable person on Earth.

Once asked about his preferred legacy, Ali said: “I would like to be remembered as a man who won the heavyweight title three times, who was humorous and who treated everyone right. As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him ... who stood up for his beliefs ... who tried to unite all humankind through faith and love.”

“And if all that’s too much, then I guess I’d settle for being remembered only as a great boxer who became a leader and a champion of his people,” he said. “And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.”

Who: Former world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali

What: Muhammad Ali died

Why: Not given

When: On Friday aged 74

Where: in the hospital

How: Not given

Keywords:

1. unprecedented (adj.) 前所未有的

2. flair (n.) 天分

3. showmanship (n.) 表演技巧

4. respiratory (adj.) 呼吸的

5. ailment (n.) 疾病

6. disclose (v.) 說出/揭露

7. prowess (n.) 英勇

8. racism (n.) 種族歧視

9. legacy (n.) 遺產

10. folk (n.) 人們

Reference:

http://news.ltn.com.tw/news/focus/breakingnews/1719504

Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide

In a long-sought victory for the gay rights movement, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote on Friday that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.

“No longer may this liberty be denied,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the historic decision. “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.”

Marriage is a “keystone of our social order,” Justice Kennedy said, adding that the plaintiffs in the case were seeking “equal dignity in the eyes of the law.”

The decision, which was the culmination of decades of litigation and activism, set off jubilation and tearful embraces across the country, the first same-sex marriages in several states, and resistance — or at least stalling — in others. It came against the backdrop of fast-moving changes in public opinion, with polls indicating that most Americans now approve of the unions.

The court’s four more liberal justices joined Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. Each member of the court’s conservative wing filed a separate dissent, in tones ranging from resigned dismay to bitter scorn.In dissent, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the Constitution had nothing to say on the subject of same-sex marriage.

“If you are among the many Americans — of whatever sexual orientation — who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”

In a second dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia mocked the soaring language of Justice Kennedy, who has become the nation’s most important judicial champion of gay rights.

“The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic,” Justice Scalia wrote of his colleague’s work. “Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent.”

As Justice Kennedy finished announcing his opinion from the bench on Friday, several lawyers seated in the bar section of the court’s gallery wiped away tears, while others grinned and exchanged embraces.

Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010, was on hand for the decision, and many of the justices’ clerks took seats in the chamber, which was nearly full as the ruling was announced. The decision made same-sex marriage a reality in the 13 states that had continued to ban it.

Outside the Supreme Court, the police allowed hundreds of people waving rainbow flags and holding signs to advance onto the court plaza as those present for the decision streamed down the steps. “Love has won,” the crowd chanted as courtroom witnesses threw up their arms in victory.

In remarks in the Rose Garden, President Obama welcomed the decision, saying it “affirms what millions of Americans already believe in their hearts.”

“Today,” he said, “we can say, in no uncertain terms, that we have made our union a little more perfect.”

Justice Kennedy was the author of all three of the Supreme Court’s previous gay rights landmarks. The latest decision came exactly two years after his majority opinion in United States v. Windsor, which struck down a federal law denying benefits to married same-sex couples, and exactly 12 years after his majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down laws making gay sex a crime.

In all of those decisions, Justice Kennedy embraced a vision of a living Constitution, one that evolves with societal changes.

“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times,” he wrote on Friday. “The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”

This drew a withering response from Justice Scalia, a proponent of reading the Constitution according to the original understanding of those who adopted it. His dissent was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

“They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment,” Justice Scalia wrote of the majority, “a ‘fundamental right’ overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since.”

“These justices know,” Justice Scalia said, “that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry.”

Justice Kennedy rooted the ruling in a fundamental right to marriage. Of special importance to couples, he said, is raising children.

“Without the recognition, stability and predictability marriage offers,” he wrote, “their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.”

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion.

In dissent, Chief Justice Roberts said the majority opinion was “an act of will, not legal judgment.”

“The court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the states and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs,” he wrote. “Just who do we think we are?”

WHO: American

WHAT: some people try to make same-sex marriage legal, and finally success

WHEN: June 26, 2015

WHERE: the USA

WHY: not given

HOW: through the vote that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage

KEYWORDS:

1. profound (adj.) 意義深遠的/淵博的

2. fidelity (n.) 忠誠

3. plaintiff (n.) 原告/起訴人

4. dignity (n.) 尊嚴/高貴/自尊

5. culmination (n.) 頂點/高潮

6. dissent (n.) 異議

7. dismay (n.) 沮喪/氣餒

8. mock (v.) 嘲弄/嘲笑

9. dimension (n.) 範圍

10. bigotry (n.) 盲從

REFERENCE:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html?_r=0

In Long-Overdue Speech, Dissident Says Nobel Opened Her Heart

When she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, while under house arrest in Myanmar, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said Saturday, she realized that the Burmese “were not going to be forgotten.”

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded her the prize, she said in her Nobel lecture here on Saturday, 21 years later, it was recognition that “the oppressed and the isolated in Burma were also a part of the world, they were recognizing the oneness of humanity.” But “it did not seem quite real, because in a sense I did not feel myself to be quite real at that time,” she said. “The Nobel Peace Prize opened up a door in my heart.”

She said the prize “had made me real once again; it had drawn me back into the wider human community,” and it had given the oppressed people of Burma, now Myanmar, and its dispersed refugees, new hope. “To be forgotten,” Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi added, “is to die a little.” In a quiet, throaty voice on Saturday she asked the world not to forget other prisoners of conscience, both in Myanmar and around the world, other refugees, others in need, who may be suffering twice over, she said, from oppression and from the larger world’s “compassion fatigue.”

It was a remarkable moment for the slight Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who turns 67 next week and is now a member of Parliament and the leader of Myanmar’s opposition. She dressed in shades of purple and lavender, her hair adorned with flowers. It is a gesture she makes in honor of her father, Gen. Aung San, an independence hero of Burma, who was assassinated in 1947, when she was 2, but whom she remembers threading flowers through her hair.


The audience in Oslo’s City Hall, which included the Norwegian royal family, listened raptly, applauding often, standing to clap when Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi entered the hall and when she finished her speech, which was at the same time modest, personal and touching, an appeal to find practical ways to reduce the inextinguishable suffering of the world. “Suffering degrades, embitters and enrages,” she said. “War is not the only arena where peace is done to death.”

Absolute peace is an unattainable goal, she said. “But it is one towards which we must continue to journey, our eyes fixed on it as a traveler in a desert fixes his eyes on the one guiding star that will lead him to salvation.”

She had thought much on the Buddhist idea of “dukkha,” or suffering, in her long years of isolation and house arrest, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi said. “If suffering were an unavoidable part of our existence, we should try to alleviate it as far as possible in practical, earthly ways.”

One crucial avenue, she said, was simple kindness. “Of the sweets of adversity, and let me say that those are not numerous, I have found the sweetest, the most precious of all, is the lesson I learned on the value of kindness,” she said, with a rare shred of humor. “Every kindness I received, small or big, convinced me that there could never be enough of it in the world.” Kindness, she said, “can change the lives of people.”

Her comments on Myanmar were careful but considered. She called for national reconciliation and cease-fire agreements between the government and “ethnic nationality forces,” which she said she hoped would “lead to political settlements founded on the aspirations of the peoples, and the spirit of the nation.”

“In my own country,” she said, “hostilities have not ceased in the far north,” and “to the west, communal violence” has flared in the days before she left Myanmar. She spoke of the Burmese concept of peace, which she defined as “the happiness arising from the cessation of factors that militate against the harmonious and the wholesome.” The term, nyein-chan, translates literally, she said, as “the beneficial coolness that comes when a fire is extinguished.”

She had never thought of winning prizes, she said. “The prize we were working for was a free, secure and just society,” she said. “The honor lay in our endeavor.”

Her endurance against dictatorship and steadfastness to her principles has brought comparisons to Nelson Mandela. Her life has also been one of personal sacrifice.

For her country, and for the legacy of her father, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi could be said to have given up her family: her beloved husband, Michael Aris, a professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at Oxford, and her two children, Alexander and Kim, who grew up largely without her. Myanmar’s former military government persistently refused to grant them visas to visit her, even when Mr. Aris grew ill with prostate cancer, apparently in the hope that she would leave Myanmar herself to visit them.

She refused to do so, fearing with reason that the government would not allow her back into the country. After Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s initial house arrest in 1989, Mr. Aris was allowed to visit only five times, the last time during Christmas in 1995. Hedied in March 1999, on his 53rd birthday; to the end, he supported her decision to remain in Myanmar.

She had returned to Myanmar from Britain in March 1988 to nurse her ill mother, Daw Khin Kyi, and became caught up in the swirling protests against years of eccentric autocracy and military rule. In January 1989, just after her mother’s funeral,she and her husband sat for a rare interview at her mother’s house in Rangoon, now Yangon, as their children ran about the rooms, with their faded colonial elegance.


“You know, when I married Michael,” she said, “I made him promise that if there was ever a time that I had to go back to my country, he would not stand in my way. And he promised.” Mr. Aris said: “That’s true. She made me promise.”

She said then that she understood how much her stature depended on her father’s aura. “I don’t pretend that I don’t owe my position in Burmese politics to my father, at least at the beginning,” she said. “It’s time to look at what people do.”

At another moment, she said: “Really, I’m doing this for my father. I’m quite happy they see me as my father’s daughter. My only concern is that I prove worthy of him.”

Once fate intervened, she chose the life she has lived, and there is little doubt that she has proved herself fierce, loyal and worthy, both to her father and to her people.

Thorbjorn Jagland, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, praised her and thanked her “for your fearlessness, your tenacity and your strength.” He said: “Your life is a message to all of us.”

WHO: Aung San Suu Kyi

WHAT: Aung San Suu Kyi won The Nobel Peace Prize

WHEN: June 16,2012

WHERE: in Oslo's City Hall

WHY: not given

KEYWORDS:

1.  disperse (v.) 分開/傳布

2.  oppressed (adj.) 受壓迫的

3.  arena (n.) 競技場/舞台

4.  alleviate (v.) 減輕/緩解

5.  adversity (n.) 逆境/災難

6.  reconciliation (n.) 和解/緩和

7.  flare (n.) 閃耀

8.  sacrifice (n.) 犧牲/祭品

9.  legacy (n.) 遺產

10. elegance (n.) 優雅

PREFERENCE:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/world/asia/aung-san-suu-kyi-accepts-nobel-peace-prize.html

Aleppo left out of Syria fighting ‘freeze’

Regime aircraft pounded rebel areas of Syria’s second city, Aleppo, which was left out of a deal to “freeze” fighting despite international outrage over renewed violence. Shelling and air raids in Aleppo over the past week have killed more than 230 civilians and pushed a landmark Feb. 27 ceasefire to the verge of collapse.

On Friday, crude barrel bombs smashed into residential neighborhoods as rescue workers scrambled to cope with the casualties.

Near the city’s eastern rebel-held Fardos District, the civil defense, known as the White Helmets, pulled bloodied bodies caked in dust from a building that had been hit. A reporter saw a distraught man cradling his wounded daughter, who appeared to be about 10 years old, in an ambulance.

“My daughter, oh God, my daughter, please someone get in and drive,” he shouted. 

After a rescue worker jumped into the driver’s seat, the young girl whimpered: “I’m going to die... I’m going to die.”

 

Some onlookers helped rescue workers remove rubble as others stared at the sky waiting for the next strike.

Bombardments of the city killed 17 people in rebel-held districts and 13 people in the government-controlled western neighborhoods, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. 

“The earth is shaking beneath our feet,” one resident of the densely populated Bustan al-Qasr area told reporters.

An air raid also hit a local clinic in rebel-held al-Maja neighborhood, wounding several people, including a nurse, the White Helmets said.

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders reported a clinic was “totally destroyed” but without casualties. It was not clear if it was the same facility.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, a total of four medical facilities were hit in Aleppo on Friday on both sides of the front line.

“There can be no justification for these appalling acts of violence deliberately targeting hospitals and clinics,” the committee’s head in Syria Marianne Gasser said.

“People keep dying in these attacks. There is no safe place anymore in Aleppo. Even in hospitals,” she said.

It was the second time this week that an air strike hit one of the few medical facilities still operating in rebel areas.

A raid on Wednesday hit al-Quds Hospital and nearby flats, killing 30 people in an attack UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned as “inexcusable.”

Doctor Mohammad Wassim Maaz — known as the most qualified pediatrician in eastern Aleppo — was among the dead at the hospital.

Despite the carnage, Aleppo has been excluded from a fresh “freeze” in fighting brokered by the US and Russia.

Syria’s armed forces said that it was scheduled to begin at 1:00am yesterday and last for 24 hours in Damascus and the nearby rebel bastion of Eastern Ghouta, and 72 hours in the coastal Latakia Province.

A monitor said fighters had laid down their arms on both fronts. “It’s quiet in Latakia and in eastern Ghouta. There is no shelling at the moment,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told reporters.

UN special envoy for Syria Michael Ratney said the agreement was a “general recommitment” to the original truce, “not a new set of local ceasefires.”

A Syrian security source said the deal was brokered by the US and Russia, but that Moscow had refused a request by Washington to include Aleppo.

US Secretary of State John Kerry called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to discuss “keeping and reinforcing” the broader ceasefire, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

WHO: Syrian in Aleppo

WHAT: Aleppo was pounded to rubble by the aircraft of regime

WHEN: in May, last year

WHERE: in Syria

WHY: not given

HOW: by crude barrel bombs

KEYWORDS:

1. outrage (n.) 憤慨/暴行

2. shell (v.) 砲轟/砲擊

3. crude (adj.) 簡陋的

4. barrel (n.) 桶

5. distraught (adj.) 極為不安的

6. casualty (n.) (嚴重事故或戰爭中的)傷亡人員

7. whimper (v.) (因疼痛或不高興而)嗚咽/抽泣

8. beneath (prep.) 在...下方

9. justification (n.) 正當的理由/辯解

10. counterpart (n.) (與不同組織或組織的人或物)作用相同者

REFERENCE:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2016/05/01/2003645255

Britain, Europe and a referendum

In the late 1960s, young students such as myself supported the Common Market (as it was then known), and Britain’s membership of it, for a mixture of reasons, but mainly for political and cultural ones. If post-World War II peace was to survive, then Western Europe needed some degree of economic and political unity that monitored Germany; the US needed an allied bloc to set against the Eastern European nations that by then were firmly in the communist bloc; and economic recovery from dismal austerity required expanding markets and greater movements of people and skills.

However, many of the original motives became perverted and obscured, the EU was born as a child of post-war positivism and liberalism and naive faith in Western democracy as a bulwark against the demonstrably “failed states” of Germany, Italy, Spain and parts of Eastern Europe.

However, in the period that the Common Market evolved into the present EU, three major tendencies cemented into an agenda that drastically moved it away from such simple faiths and visions, and that has recently lead to the harsh treatment of debtor systems from Cyprus to Greece to Spain, and are likely to soon extend to Italy and several of the new-member nations, the latter of whom tend to promise many things more in hope than with conviction.

First, the EU is ruled by the economic ideology of the so-called “troika” of Germany, the IMF and the European Bank, which tends to see everything in terms of market economics. Thus, the loose Euro-migration policies are not children of radical sympathies for migrants and their needs, but merely aspects of the logic of markets — if goods and capital and knowledge markets are unrestricted within Europe, then labor markets must also be.

This is the logic behind the “liberal” profile for migration under Smithian classical economic assumptions that migrants add to the labor market. Competition in that market thereby represents an optimization of use of labor and this happens best if labor freely moves from job to job, skill to skill, location to location. This does not speak to local communities, notions of cultural and political identity, or worker solidarity, nor to the location of special welfare regimes for poor workers, the unskilled or unemployed within particular nations. Anti-EU votes in Britain could be seen as a refusal of this theorizing and its social outcomes.

Second, the dominant central political parties have moved firmly right in the past 20 years in the US, UK, France, Germany and elsewhere, and the British referendum result could be seen as a rejection of major parties and a move toward extremes, minorities and a rat-bag collection of competing and often contradictory policies and perspectives. For instance, the “exit” groups in the UK have bought into temporary alliance people who seriously dislike each other and could not be ever visualized as belonging in the future to one party central to UK politics.

Third, to an extent the vote is a rejection of globalism and financialism, the rhetoric of austerity, which has often merely disguised regressive policies of low taxation, low expenditure, and low innovation — thus combining failing social services with low-growth economies — in order to protect the livelihoods or extreme wealth of financial groupings, investors and bankers, in what might be called the post-1971 perspective of the IMF and of the EU.

WHO: Britain,European

WHAT: a referendum about England leaving Europe Union or not

WHEN: in June, last year

WHERE: British

WHY: because Britain thought they were ruled by EU too much

HOW: by voting

KEYWORDS:

1. bloc (n.) 集團;陣營(指具有類似政治利益的國家或人的群體)

2. dismal (adj.) 悲傷絕望的

3. austerity (n.) 艱苦/節儉

4. pervert (v.) 歪曲

5. cement (v.) 加強/鞏固

6. bulwark (n.) 保障

7. labor market (n.) 勞工市場

8. regime (n.) 政權/政體

9. referendum (n.) (重大決議的)全民公投

10. alliance (n.) 同盟國/聯盟

REFERENCE:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2016/06/27/2003649550

Military extends UAV deployment area

The military said it is able to effectively detect military deployments in China through the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), after it expanded detection zones from airspace over eastern and southern Taiwan to airspace over the Taiwan Strait.

According to a military official, who wished to remain anonymous, the US has expressed concern over how the UAV project has developed and military missions the drones are commissioned to perform.

The US has demanded that the Ministry of National Defense send specialists to brief the US Department of Defense on the project before a delegation was to head to the US for a meeting about bilateral cooperation on military issues involving high-level officials from both countries, the military official said.

A UAV launched from a base in western Taiwan would be able to detect military movement in China’s southeast coastal area, he said.

Given Taiwan’s proximity to China, the capability of the UAVs to detect military deployments on the other side of the Taiwan Strait is highly valued by the US, he said.

Despite the US having sophisticated UAVs that can fly long distances to access the area, there are concerns within the US military that such missions would be costly, as well as there being political and military issues preventing its use of UAVs in the area, he added.

The UAV development program was undertaken by the National Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology. It has delivered 32 UAVs to the army.

In addition to Taimali (太麻里) in Taitung County, where the UAVs are based and training exercises are carried out, the ministry has been in talks with the Civil Aeronautics Administration over the possibility that part of the Hengchun airport in Pingtung could be used as another training base for the drones.

According to sources from the military, the air force’s airspace training area is within the range of missiles deployed in southeast China, making it impossible for the air force to carry out missions in the areas that the UAVs can access.

The military said it was still deliberating whether it would deploy the UAVs in western Taiwan.

WHO: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAN);Taiwanese Military;American Military 

WHAT: American Military left a UAN in the southern of Taiwan 

WHEN: in July,2014

WHERE: Taiwan

WHY: Because American Military regards Taiwan as an important part when the war broke out

HOW: not given

Keywords:

1. aerial (n.) 天線

2. airspace (n.) 領空

3. drone (n.) (引擎的)轟鳴聲/嗡嗡聲

4. commission (v.) (正式的)安排(某人)做/委任/認命

5. delegation (n.) 代表團/授權

6. bilateral (adj.) 雙方的

7. sophisticate (n.) 精明幹練的人

8. institute (n.) 研究院  (v.)建立 

9. ministry (n.) (政府的)部/牧師職責

10. missile (n.) 導彈/投擲物

Reference:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2014/07/13/2003594974

President Obama and President Putin hold side meeting as world leaders open COP21 Paris

As 150 leaders met in Paris to open a landmark 14-day conference, a tense 30 minutes spent in the wings had the world talking.

Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin held private talks at the sidelines of the Leaders Event at the COP21 climate conference, where Presidents, Prime Ministers and royalty from nearly every country in the world have gathered to push for an urgent deal to prevent the world warming by more than two degrees by 2100.

While the side meeting was not an any agenda, a White House official said President Obama urged President Putin to back down in his war of words with Turkey after the country shot down a Russian plane last week. The pair also discussed a ceasefire in the Ukraine and resolution in Syria, where Obama warned Putin that Syrian President Assad would have to leave power as part of a transition in the country.

It was a rare tense moment in an extraordinary day of solidarity from global leaders who expressed overwhelming support for a global agreement on climate change. During hours of official speeches they showed allegiance with Paris in the fight against terror and issued an unmistakeable warning to their delegates who will hammer out a deal over the next 14 days: Do not mess this up.

President Obama said the world had come to Paris to “show their resolve” in preventing global warming in an “act of defiance that proves nothing will deter us from the future we want for our children.”“What greater rejection of those that would tear down our world than martialing our best efforts to save it?” he said.

The US leader also held a side-meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and the world’s two largest emitters — responsible for around 45 per cent of emissions combined — reiterated their commitment to bringing that portion down.


“There is such a thing as being too late and when it comes to climate change that hour is almost upon us,” the President said, emphasising there are “hundreds of billions of dollars ready to deploy” when it comes to investing in renewable energies.

President Putin used his speech to call climate change one of the “gravest challenges humanity is facing” and said Russia’s efforts to reduce emissions have slowed down global warming by “more than a year.”

“At the same time we have managed to double our GDP. Thus we have demonstrated that we could ensure economic development and take care of our environment at the same time.”

The event was also used by countries to announce billions of dollars in funding for renewable energy, clean technology and mitigating the effects of climate change around the world.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Australia would ratify the second commitment of the Kyoto Protocol and said $1 billion of the existing aid budget would go to building climate resilience and reducing emissions — something Greens climate spokesman Senator Larissa Waters called “fudging the figures”. However he failed to join 40 other nations in pledging an end to subsidies in the fossil fuels industry
.
The backdrop of the terror attacks in Paris nearly three weeks ago led to emotional opening statements from leaders at the Le Bourget site on the outskirts of the city.

UN Secretary-general Ban Ki Moon held a minute’s silence in honour of the victims and said “political momentum like this may not come again.”

He also issued a direct line to delegates: “The future of our planet is in your hands. We cannot afford indecision, half measures or merely gradual approaches” using marches held around the world as a sign that global eyes are upon them.

French President Francois Hollande expressed gratitude for those that had showed solidarity with Paris and said it meant the world would not be disappointed.

“Climate change will bring conflict, just like clouds bring storms causing migration, resource shortages, famine, rural exodus and clashes for access to water,” he said.

“Essentially what is at stake with this climate conference is peace.”

A final verdict on the negotiations will be delivered on December 11 before the baton is handed to Morocco who will host next year’s event.

WHO: 150 leaders from different countries
WHAT: a meeting about Paris climate change
WHEN: in December last year
WHERE: in Paris
WHY: discuss about a deal to prevent global warming
HOW: not given

Keywords: 

1. ceasefire (n.) 停火協定

2. overwhelming (adj.) 無法抗拒的

3. delegate (n.) (尤指會議的)代表

4. hammer (v.) (用力)敲打  (n.) 鐵鎚

5. emitter (n.) 輻射體

6. reiterate (v.) 重申

7. grave (adj.) 嚴重的  (n.)墳墓

8. ratify (v.) (尤指政府或組織)正式批准/使正式生效

9. resilience (n.) 韌性

10. baton (n.) 接力棒/(樂隊指揮用)指揮棒

References: 

http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/president-obama-and-president-putin-hold-side-meeting-as-world-leaders-open-cop21-paris/news-story/6a6ce3588af139eb61f5d18e8ff3c29b