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