6_SpaceX (rocket, landing)

SpaceX Rocket Sticks Landing on the 5th Try

Apr 8, 2016
By KENNETH CHANG

For SpaceX, the fifth time was the charm in the impressive feat of landing a rocket on a boat.

On Friday, SpaceX — more formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corporation of Hawthorne, Calif. — launched a mission taking cargo for NASA to the International Space Station. While the capsule carrying 7,000 pounds of experiments, supplies and equipment continued to orbit, the booster stage of the Falcon 9 rocket turned around and headed back toward a floating platform off the coast of Florida.

SpaceX had attempted this maneuver four times before. Each time the booster stage reached the platform only to tip over and explode.

This time, the booster settled down on the boat, named “Of Course I Still Love You,” and remained upright, to loud cheers at SpaceX’s California headquarters and chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has said reusability of rockets is crucial to reducing the cost of sending payloads to space. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin, another rocket start-up from another Internet entrepreneur, Jeffrey P. Bezos of Amazon, have made successful strides in landing rocket stages in the past half year.

This is the second time SpaceX has successfully landed a booster stage. In December, it was able to fly the booster all the way back to land and set it down in one piece at Cape Canaveral.

Friday’s main mission of sending cargo to the space station was also a success, lifting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The Dragon capsule will arrive at the space station on Sunday. The cargo includes an inflatable module, with soft instead of metal walls, which is to test technology that could be used for future deep-space missions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/science/on-fifth-try-mission-accomplished-for-spacex-booster-rocket.html?_r=0


Structure of the Lead：
     WHO-Elon Musk, SpaceX
     WHEN-Apr 8, 2016
     WHAT-SpaceX landed a rocket on a boat
     WHY-for the reusability of rockets to reducing the cost of sending payloads to space
     WHERE-the coast of Florida
     HOW-not given

Keywords：
   1. reusability：重複使用，回收再利用
   2. entrepreneur：企業家；事業創辦者
   3. stride：大步，進展，進步
   4. booster：援助者；信號放大器
   5. cargo：（船、飛機、車輛裝載的）貨物

5_Paris Climate Change Conference

Paris climate treaty ratified in race against the clock

Fri, Oct 07, 2016
AFP, PARIS

The historic Paris climate pact dashed across the ratification finish line on Wednesday to diplomatic cheers.
“A turning point for the planet,” US President Barack Obama said.
“A defining moment for the global economy,” said Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever and chairman of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
However, the cold, hard reality of what is needed to fulfill the agreement’s pledges will soon bite, experts warned.
Its accelerated entry into force was driven by many things, including the prospect of US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — who has described global warming as a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese — winning the White House.
The rapid, joint ratification by China and the US also set an example hard to ignore, but the main impetus for locking in the deal was clearly the growing sense of urgency about the looming threat of climate change.
“Time is absolutely of the essence,” Greenpeace International executive director Jennifer Morgan said. “The question is not ‘whether,’ it is ‘how fast.’”
Almost daily, global warming red flags are popping up.
Every month so far this year has set a temperature record and this year is on track to supplant last year as the hottest ever registered.
Scientists have forecast that average global temperatures — already 1℃ above the preindustrial benchmark — could sail past 1.5℃ within a decade and 2℃ by mid-century.
A maelstrom of superstorms fueled by rising seas, deadly floods and drought prompted the world’s nations to lower the threshold for dangerous warming in the Paris pact to “well below” 2℃.
Reaching that target will require a breakneck, wholesale shift across the globe away from fossil fuels.
Even that will not be enough: We will have to learn how to suck carbon out of the air, scientists say.
The Paris accord’s early validation comes just in time to take center stage at high-level UN talks in Marrakesh next month tasked with translating its planet-saving vision into policy.
It could also accelerate the process.
“This shifts the focus to implementation and strengthening the commitments under the agreement,” said Alden Meyer, a veteran climate analyst at the Washington-based Union for Concerned Scientists.
Nations have informally set a 2018 target for hammering out more than 100 concrete rules and procedures embedded in the climate pact — some of them highly contentious. Originally, the agreement left open a four-year window for that process.
“Many details need to be ironed out before implementation can begin,” said Harjeet Singh, head of climate change for ActionAid.
They include rules for reporting and verification of emissions cuts, how to disburse hundreds of billions of dollars to climate-vulnerable developing nations and the establishment of new market mechanisms.
Even more important, 2018 is shaping up to be a crucial “political moment” when nations will feel pressure to revise and deepen pledges to slash carbon emissions.
At their current level, these so-called “nationally determined contributions” — which do not begin until 2020 — fall woefully short of the target and would result in an unlivable 3℃ warmer planet by the end of the century.
Bolstered by a special report from the UN’s climate science panel, to be completed by mid-2018, the world’s major greenhouse-gas emitters will also be expected to deliver detailed national plans, or “pathways,” for economic transformation through 2050.
“If you are going to achieve the objectives in Paris, you need a north star that gives you the direction of travel,” said Meyer, adding that the US, Germany and Canada have taken the lead.
That north star will likewise be visible to corporations and business leaders.

The new treaty “sends an unmistakable signal to business and investors that the global transition to a low-carbon economy is urgent, inevitable and accelerating faster than we ever believed possible,” Polman said.


http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2016/10/07/2003656693


Structure of the Lead：
     WHO-Paris Climate Change Conference
     WHEN-Fri, Oct 07, 2016
     WHAT-the historic Paris climate pact dashed across the ratification finish line
     WHY-not given
     WHERE-Paris
     HOW-not given

Keywords：
   1. ratification：批准；承認
   2. impetus：推動，促進
   3. ratify：（正式）批准；認可
   4. breakneck：非常危險的
   5. verification：確認；證明；核實
   

4_Climate Change (Leonardo Dicaprio)

People really do pay attention to climate change —when Leonardo DiCaprio talks about it

Aug 5, 2016
By Chris Mooney

Do celebrities matter? The answer — modern, big data approaches are showing — is pretty clearly “yes.”

Earlier this year, a team of researchers documented that when Charlie Sheen told the world that he had HIV, media attention to the virus — which had been in long decline — spiked massively.

And now, many of the same researchers are back with another demonstration. They find that when Leonardo DiCaprio used his Oscar speech earlier this year to exhort action on climate change, tweets and Google searches about the topic were enormous and, at least in the case of tweets, appear to have set a new record based on analyses between 2011 and the present.

“A single speech, at a very opportunistic time, at the Oscar ceremony, resulted in the largest increase in public engagement with climate change ever,” says John Ayers of San Diego State University, who completed the work with colleagues from the University of California San Diego, the Santa Fe Institute, and other institutions. Their study was just published in the open access journal PLOS One.

DiCaprio, winning the Oscar for best actor for “The Revenant” on Feb. 28, said this:

Making “The Revenant” was about man’s relationship to the natural world — a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now, it is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous peoples of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this, for our children’s children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed.

When DiCaprio said this, 34.5 million people were watching.

Ayers and his colleagues used a combination of media coverage searches using the Bloomberg Terminal, Twitter content searches and Google trends search data to examine the consequences. They also closely examined how the public response to this moment compared with past attention to climate change at key times, including during the Paris climate negotiations and the 2015 Earth Day.

They also used a modeling approach to estimate what typical media coverage and social media engagement with the subject of climate change would have been if DiCaprio had not spoken out — what a more “normal” level of attention would be.

The result was that while there was virtually no news media response to DiCaprio (most journalists don’t take their marching orders from celebrities speaking out), the social media and search response was enormous.


“Tweets mentioning climate change or global warming were 636 percent higher than expected the day DiCaprio spoke,” the study finds.

Here’s a figure from the study showing as much, through a comparison of media coverage and tweets about climate change over time:


News articles and Twitter postings for climate change or global warming. Time trends show daily trends for news articles and Twitter postings that included the terms climate change or global warming. (Leas et al. 2016)

The authors add that when DiCaprio spoke, the total number of Tweets that contained the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” “were at the highest recorded value in our database with more than 250,000 tweets on that day.”

And then there were the Google searches. These, too, spiked, so much so that it represented the “third-highest point ever recorded for climate change or global warming on Google trends.”

Here, again, is a chart provided by the authors, showing that the searches often used DiCaprio’s actual words:

 
Hourly Google searches around DiCaprio’s Oscar speech. (Leas et al., 2016).

The significance of this, says study author Ayers, is that celebrities speaking out really matters, even if it doesn’t make the traditional news.

“Even though it didn’t get that coverage, speaking up on it can still make a difference, by driving record levels of engagement,” he says.

Ayers adds that with the methods used in the study, it could be possible at some time in the future to actually time further advocacy and engagement campaigns to maximize the impact of a moment such as the DiCaprio speech.

“Imagine if you will that hundreds of leaders came out the next day and piggybacked on this message,” he says. “That’s hypothetical, but with these data, that’s hypothetically possible in the future. We rely entirely on free, publicly available, and real time data.”

More generally, the lesson is that when it comes to waking people up about changes to the planet, it can’t just be climate scientists talking all the time.

“The scientific community must adapt to the 21st century dynamic communication landscape and ready itself for the next opportunity to harness the agents of change,” the study concludes.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/08/05/the-leo-effect-when-dicaprio-talked-climate-change-at-the-oscars-people-suddenly-cared/?utm_term=.ff5b0101c324


Structure of the Lead：
     WHO-Leonardo DiCaprio
     WHEN-Aug 5, 2016
     WHAT-the actor was a more powerful conversation starter for climate change than the Paris climate negotiations in Paris or Earth Day
     WHY-He wanted to raised people's attention toward the climate change.
     WHERE-at the Oscar ceremony
     HOW-by a single speech

Keywords：
   1. indigenous：本地的
   2. greed：貪婪
   3. (media) coverage：新聞報道
   4. significance：重要
   5. advocacy：擁護；提倡

3_Refugees

Cameras capture moment boat off Libya overturns

Fri, May 27, 2016
AFP, ROME

Dramatic images released on Wednesday by the Italian Navy captured the moment a heavily overcrowded boat overturned off Libya, leaving at least five people dead.

The blue fishing vessel, its deck heaving with people, tipped over after the refugees rushed to one side on spotting a rescue ship — an all too frequent mistake that has led to many disasters on the Mediterranean Sea.

The refugees, many of them men, some already wearing orange lifejackets as a precaution, were captured in rare photographs as they clung to the boat’s rails or each other, or dropped into the sea.

Some are seen hanging on to the starboard edge by their fingertips as the trawler rolls, while others try to balance on the rim.

Pictures taken seconds later show the churning waters around the boat peppered with people trying to get away from the vessel which, now overturned, begins to sink, with four people still perched on its upturned hull.

The navy said its Bettica patrol boat had spotted “a boat in precarious conditions off the coast of Libya with numerous migrants aboard,” but the trawler overturned shortly afterward “due to overcrowding.”

The Bettica threw liferafts and jackets to those in the water, while another navy ship in the area sent a helicopter and rescue boats.

Survivors can be seen in the photographs wearing life-rings, some swimming toward the Bettica as the helicopter whirrs overhead.

The navy said 562 people had been pulled to safety.

The operation wound up late on Wednesday without finding any further survivors or bodies.

The refugees had sounded the alarm by calling for help using a satellite phone about 18 nautical miles (33.3km) off Libya.

The Bettica went on to pluck another 108 refugees from their dilapidated vessel in a second rescue operation on Wednesday.

It is not the first time a boat making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea has overturned because of sudden movement onboard when help was in sight.

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 1,370 refugees have lost their lives so far this year as they attempt the crossing to Europe.

The latest arrivals bring the number of people rescued and transferred to Italy since the start of the year to about 40,000 following the rescue of more than 6,000 since Monday, according to figures collated by the UN’s refugee agency and the Italian Coast Guard.


http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2016/05/27/2003647259


Structure of the Lead：
     WHO-refugees
     WHEN-Fri, May 27, 2016
     WHAT-a heavily overcrowded boat overturned off Libya, leaving at least five people dead
     WHY-refugees attempt the crossing to Europe
     WHERE-Libya
     HOW-not given

Keywords：
   1. overcrowd：使過度擁擠
   2. vessel：船，艦
   3. churn：劇烈攪動；翻騰
   4. dilapidate：使荒廢；毀壞；浪費
   5. satellite：衛星
   

2_Paris terror attack

Silent fans remember victims of Paris attacks

Sun, Nov 13, 2016

AP, SAINT-DENIS, France

Players linked arms as fans stood to observe a minute’s silence at Stade de France on Friday, almost one year after the Paris attacks.

The poignant silence before the World Cup qualifier between France and Sweden remembered victims of the attacks on Nov. 13 last year, which saw 130 people killed and hundreds more injured.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks.

The night of terror began when three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the stadium, where France was playing Germany in a friendly match. One passerby was killed. At least one of the bombers tried to enter the stadium, but was foiled by security guards.

Security measures were the same Friday as they have been since the attacks, with spectators patted down and their bags searched twice — once near to the stadium and the second time close to the entry gates.

However, the atmosphere was calm and relaxed. Several international rugby and soccer matches have been played at the stadium since then, including the European Championship final in July.

Players from the French and Swedish national teams stood facing each other either side of the halfway line, many with their heads bowed as they solemnly remembered the victims.

“In a way we’re linked to this drama,” France goalkeeper and captain Hugo Lloris said on the eve of the match. “You have to try and move forward, look ahead. Even though these events will probably stay in our memories for life.” However, it was not quite a perfect silence.

A few random voices — among 80,000 fans — shouted out sporadically, but it was otherwise impeccably observed.

Moments before the silence, France’s national anthem, La Marseillaise, was played as usual.

However, this time something different happened.

Fans were already singing heartily when the accompanying music suddenly stopped halfway through, and the noise levels went up considerably as only the sound of supporters singing could be heard echoing around the stadium.

The Nov. 13 attacks started at about 9:20pm outside the stadium, during the first half of France’s match against Germany.

French President Francois Hollande was evacuated from the stadium, and he was in attendance again on Friday to watch France beat Sweden 2-1.

Following the bombings outside the stadium last year, six cafes were targeted in quick and coordinated attacks and the heaviest bloodshed of all came at the Bataclan concert hall, where 90 of the victims were killed.

“Time passes, but no one will forget or can forget what happened, that France was deeply affected,” France coach Didier Deschamps said after the match. “We can move forward, OK, but it was important to show our support for the families of the victims and all the people who were affected.”

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/sport/archives/2016/11/13/2003659158

Structure of the Lead：

     WHO-Players from the French and Swedish national teams, fans

     WHEN-Sun, Nov 13, 2016

     WHAT-a minute’s silence

     WHY-remember victims of Paris attacks

     WHERE-Stade de France

     HOW-a minute’s silence

Keywords：

   1. poignant：強烈的，深刻的

   2. sporadically：偶爾，零星地

   3. accompany：伴隨，為……伴奏

   4. evacuate：使避難，使疏散

   5. suspicion：同等重要的；同一類別的

1_Malala Yousafzais

Pakistan's Malala leaves hospital ahead of surgery

Sat, Jan 5, 2013

By AFP

LONDON -- The British hospital treating Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot by the Taliban for campaigning for girls' education, said Friday that she has been temporarily discharged ahead of surgery.

Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, west-central England, said Malala would stay at her family's temporary home nearby before undergoing major surgery on her skull in a few weeks.

"Malala Yousafzai was discharged from Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham as an inpatient yesterday to continue her rehabilitation at her family's temporary home in the West Midlands," the hospital said in a statement. "The 15-year-old, who was shot by the Taliban for campaigning for girls' education, is well enough to be treated by the hospital as an outpatient for the next few weeks."

In an attack that shocked the world, Malala was shot by a Taliban hitman in October as her school bus made its way through the town of Mingora in Pakistan's northwestern Swat Valley.

The bullet grazed her brain, coming within centimeters of killing her, and she was airlifted to the specialist Queen Elizabeth Hospital days after the attack.

"She is still due to be re-admitted in late January or early February to undergo cranial reconstructive surgery as part of her long-term recovery and in the meantime she will visit the hospital regularly to attend clinical appointments," the hospital said.

Video released by the hospital showed Malala wearing a grey dress and cream patterned headscarf as she walked out of her ward, waving to staff as a nurse led her by the hand.

Photographs showed her hugging a nurse at the doors.

The hospital said Malala had been regularly leaving the hospital over the past couple of weeks to visit her family at home.

"Following discussions with Malala and her medical team, we decided that she would benefit from being at home with her parents and two brothers," said the hospital's medical director Dave Rosser.

He added that medics would be visiting Malala at home ahead of her return to hospital for surgery.

"Malala is a strong young woman and has worked hard with the people caring for her to make excellent progress in her recovery," said Rosser.

Malala's father Ziauddin Yousafzai has accepted a three-year role as Pakistan's education attache at its consulate in Birmingham, making it more likely that the family will remain in Britain long-term.

His daughter first rose to prominence aged just 11 with a blog for the BBC's Urdu service charting her life in Swat under the Taliban, whose two-year reign of terror supposedly came to an end there with an army operation in 2009.

Her attempted murder has sparked calls for her to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, while the United Nations announced a global "Malala Day" in November in support of her campaign for girls' education.

Pakistan is paying for her treatment at the Queen Elizabeth hospital, which specializes in treating British soldiers wounded in Afghanistan.

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/asia/pakistan/2013/01/05/366399/Pakistans-Malala.htm

 Structure of the Lead：

     WHO - Malala

     WHEN - Fri. Jan 4. 2013

     WHAT - The British hospital treating Malala Yousafzai said Friday that she has been temporarily discharged ahead of surgery.

     WHY - not given

     WHERE - London (The British hospital)

     HOW - not given

Keywords：

   1. "grazed" her brain: to touch lightly in passing 擦過，掠過

   2. airlift:空運

   3. ward:病房

   4. attache:使館館員

   5. consulate:領事職/任期;領事館

   6. prominence:傑出，卓越；聲望