(WEEK 9)

Muhammad Ali, 'the Greatest', dies aged 74

Muhammad Ali, the three-time heavyweight champion who proclaimed himself “the Greatest”, defied the US government over the Vietnam war, and later became one of the most well-known – and loved – sportsmen in history has died. He was 74.

Ali died late on Friday at a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, the family’s spokesperson Bob Gunnell said. His funeral will take place in his home town of Louisville, Kentucky.

Ali was admitted to hospital on Thursday with a respiratory problem – a move that was described at the time as “a precaution”. However, reports emerged 24 hours later which said he had been placed on a life support machine and his family “feared the worst”.

Ali had become increasingly frail since being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1984, aged 42, and in recent years had limited his public appearances. Earlier this month his brother Rahman Ali revealed that the condition was so advanced he could barely speak or leave his house.

As a sportsman he will be remembered for many classic fights – in particular beating the fearsome Sonny Liston to become champion; the Fight of the Century and the Thrilla in Manilla against Joe Frazier, and the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974 when, at the age of 32, he surprised everyone bar himself by cutting down George Foreman in Kinshasa to regain back his title.

Paying tribute after his death, Foreman wrote: “Ali, Fraser and Foreman we were one guy. A part of me slipped away.”

He told the BBC: “Muhammad Ali was one of the greatest human beings I have ever met. No doubt he was one of the best people to have lived in this day and age.”

Another former world heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson, wrote: “God came for his champion. So long great one.”

Tributes flooded in from the world of boxing, the wider sporting community and well beyond them. The former US president Bill Clinton described him as “courageous in the ring, inspiring to the young, compassionate to those in need, and strong and good-humoured in bearing the burden of his own health challenges”.

Ali’s influence out of the ring was no less marked. Having appalled white America by converting to the Nation of Islam and changing his name from Cassius Clay to Cassius X and then to Muhammad Ali, he later refused to be drafted into the army, telling reporters: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

In 1967, still unbeaten and with no obvious challenger in sight, Ali was stripped of his titles and for three-and-a-half years had to scrape a living making campus speeches and appearing on Broadway. He lost his best years as a fighter yet as the opposition to Vietnam war grew, so did Ali’s popularity. By the mid 1970s he was the biggest sports star on the planet.

Grace and speed

In his physical prime, a decade earlier, Ali had such grace and foot speed that watching him perform almost became an extension of the balletic arts. He won Olympic light-heavyweight gold as an 18-year-old at the Rome Olympics and four years later, in 1964, he won the heavyweight title for the first time by stopping Liston in a major upset. Challengers were dispatched with a surgical beauty, although there was a vicious streak to him too: when Ernie Terrell called him by his birth name, Cassius Clay, Ali shouted at him “What’s my name?” as he inflicted a terrible beating.

In 1971, within five months of his return in 1970, he earned a shot at his old title against Frazier, but no longer was he as elusive or brilliant. A thrilling contest ended with Ali suffering his first defeat, on points, after being dropped by a left hook in the 15th round.

A loss to the fit but limited Ken Norton appeared to confirm Ali’s decline – until, in 1974, he knocked out Foreman after using what he called “rope-a-dope”; lying on the ropes to conserve energy as his opponent punched himself out. Later, when Ali was asked when he should have retired, he admitted it was after that fight.

But he ploughed on, to a desperately gruelling decider with Frazier in Manilla which he won after Frazier’s trainer Eddie Futch pulled his man out before the 15th round. Ali would later call it the closest thing to dying he could imagine.

Retired

In 1978, after winning the title for a third time by avenging a loss to Leon Spinks, Ali retired. When he dragged himself back into the ring in 1980 to face his old sparring partner Larry Holmes, aged 38, he was probably in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. Tests carried out by the Mayo Clinic found he couldn’t hop on one foot well and had trouble co-ordinating his speech.

After a final fight, against Trevor Berbick in 1981, he retired but three years later Parkinson’s disease was diagnosed. By the end of the decade the speech of the man once dubbed “the Louisville Lip” for brash predictions before fights was reduced to a mumble.

Ali was well enough to light the torch to start the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, though his hands shook as a result of the disease taking further hold. After that there was further retreat into privacy and prayer.

But even in death his legacy burns on.

who:Muhammad Ali
where:Phoenix, Arizona,USA
what:Died at age 74 .
when:June third,2016
keyword:
heavyweight 重量級的
defy              對抗
funeral          葬禮
compassionate慈悲的
torch              光芒    

(WEEK 8)

Among Young Britons, Fear and Despair Over Vote to Leave E.U.

LONDON — As the bands played on at the Glastonbury music festival in Somerset, England, Lewis Phillips and his friends drowned their sorrows in song and alcohol.“We’re the ones who’ve got to live with it for a long time, but a group of pensioners have managed to make a decision for us,” Mr. Phillips, 27, said on Friday of Britain’s decision to withdraw from the European Union. He said he was now “terrified” about the country’s economic prospects.

Louise Driscoll, a 21-year-old barista in London, spent most of the day crying. “I had a bad feeling in my gut,” she said of Britain’s referendum on Europe. “What do we do now? I’m very scared.” Her parents both voted to leave the bloc, she said, and “will probably be gloating.”

The vote to leave the European Union exposed tensions and fault lines in British society, but perhaps none more gaping than its generational divisions.

According to pre-election surveys by the polling organization Survation, 57 percent of Britons between the ages of 18 and 34 who intended to take part in Thursday’s referendum supported remaining in the bloc, while an identical proportion — 57 percent — of Britons over 55 supported the opposite: leaving Europe behind.

For those under 25, the desire to remain in the union was especially high: Three-quarters wanted Britain to stay in Europe.Many young people in Britain have grown up thinking of European integration as a given, not a political experiment that would be rolled back before they could fully take part in it.

They are often more comfortable living in a multicultural society than their elders are, particularly in cities like London and Edinburgh, which are flooded by people from across the Continent to study and work.

Many young Britons expressed astonishment, anger or despair that their parents and grandparents would seek to limit the travel, exposure to other cultures and opportunities to work and study abroad that being part of the European Union has afforded them.“Truly gutted that our grandparents have effectively decided that they hate foreigners more than they love us and our futures,” one young Briton, Dan Boden, wrote on Twitter.

The referendum hinged in part on youth turnout, and the government even tried to lower the voting age for the referendum to 16 from 18.

It failed, but the Remain campaign still pushed to register young voters, with some success: The deadline to register was extended by two days after a voter-registration website crashed because it was overwhelmed by visitors.

Prime Minister David Cameron turned to Tinder, the dating app, and TheLADbible, a website popular among young men, to tout the benefits of staying in the European Union. The opposition Labour Party, which supported remaining in the bloc, also reached out to young voters.

More than one million people between 18 and 34 registered in recent months, the most ever for a British election, according to Bite the Ballot and HOPE Not Hate, which encourage young people to vote. Turnout for the referendum, at around 72 percent, was the highest for any national election in Britain since 1992.

But it was not enough.

“Waking up to the #EURefResults and realizing the older generation have just ruined our future,” one young Briton, Toby Pickard, wrote on Twitter.

Another, Sarah Hartley, wrote that “our economy is in tatters” because “our grandparents cared more about their comfort than our future.”

In Edinburgh, a university city with a strongly pro-European bent, Robert Jack, a 21-year-old student at the University of Glasgow, was reeling from the decision. He worried that his plans to study in Romania on the European Union’s student-exchange program, Erasmus, were in jeopardy.

The vote “is very damaging,” Mr. Jack said, adding that he now welcomed a second referendum on whether Scotland should leave the United Kingdom, because “it’s better being inside the European Union.”

Of course, many young people supported the push to rid themselves of Europe. Ben Kew, 21, said he spent 30 hours at the Leave headquarters, watching the results come in.

“I was surprised; I didn’t think we’d go through with it, but I’m pleased that the establishment has been given a kick,” he said, adding that the vote was a moment when Britons expressed a desire for real change.

But many young voters wondered what would happen to European Union funding for research and sciences. British universities currently receive about 16 percent of their research money and staff members from the European Union.

James Calderbank, 21, a student at Falmouth University in Cornwall, England, wrote in an email: “Since the early hours of this morning my Facebook newsfeed has been filled with my friends’ disappointment that we are leaving the E.U.”

He added: “Our campus was part-funded by the E.U., so things are really not looking good for my university and its source of funds.” Cornwall, as a fairly rural and less-developed part of southwest England, was also a beneficiary of economic aid from Brussels, he noted.

Some high-school students expressed dismay as well. “There is a very clear rift between how us young people feel and how the oldest age groups feel,” Elliot Shirnia, 18, a student at the Marling School in Gloucestershire, England, wrote in an email, adding that as the son of a refugee from Iran he felt the Leave campaign was divisive.

Anxiety about the economy and immigration drove the Leave campaign’s victory. But many young people said they thought the decision would only set back their prospects.

“I’m already part of a generation stuck in rented property unable to buy my own house,” Hannah Shaw, 25, who works at a National Health Service hospital and lives with her parents, wrote in an email. “The older generation seem so happy with the result, almost smug like it’s some sort of victory completely unaware of the chaos they’ve caused for my generation. I’m dreading what will happen to employment, workers’ rights, the environment and our economy.”

She added that she had friends from countries like Slovakia, Poland, Spain and Romania.

“It’s hard to see it affect them and think of the amazing people I’ll never meet after we leave the E.U.,” she said. “The U.K. suddenly feels very small.”

Ms. Shaw blamed the news media for spreading misinformation about European Union membership. “A lot of the older generation rely on newspapers for all their facts and don’t actually do any of their own research unlike my generation.”

Jenna Ives-Moody, 19, a journalism student at the University of Huddersfield in northern England, wrote in an email that “serious fact-based journalism within the U.K. is not valued by the majority of the English population.”

She said the Leave campaign was driven by “a misplaced ideal of reclaiming former glories within Britain,” which she said was not common among young people “who embrace all aspects of being European.”

Fear was palpable among the young people in London who have thronged the capital from elsewhere in Europe.

Francisco Vicedo, a 22-year-old Spaniard who works at a branch of the fast-food chain Pret a Manger, is studying for a master’s program on organized crime and terrorism at University College London.

“We’ve already sent money to our countries because we know that in the following days the value of the pound is going to be down,” he said. “Everyone is sending money already.”

He said he hoped to stay in London, where job opportunities are more plentiful than in Spain, but was unsure of his prospects.

Dara Canavan, 23, who works at a management consultancy, comes from an Irish town just across the border from Northern Ireland, and expressed fear about the possible reimposition of border controls.

“There is a lot of worry about whether free control between Ireland and Northern Ireland will be affected,” said Mr. Canavan.

Mr. Canavan wasn’t sure he would stay in Britain. “I was thinking of going back in the future, but this could speed up the process,” he said

WHEN:2016

WHERE:England

WHAT:The United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union

WHO:British 

KEYWORD:
pensioner     領養老金者
withdraw      退出
referendum   公投
bloc              聯盟
integration    集合
multicultural 多元文化的
astonishment 驚訝
despair           絕望

(WEEK 7)Nice terror attack: Isis claims responsibility for lorry massacre in French coastal city

'He carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State,' said group.Isis has claimed responsibility for the terror attack in Nice that saw at least 84 people killed after a lorry was driven into crowds of people.

A man named as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove his vehicle more than one mile along the coastal French city's Promenade de Anglais, sending hundreds of people fleeing in horror.

And news agency Amaq, which supports the group also known as Islamic State, said via its Telegram account: "The person who carried out the operation in Nice, France, to run down people was one of the soldiers of Islamic State.

Officers carried out a raid at an address near Nice's main train station on Saturday morning and made two arrests, Europe 1 reported. They were thought to be known to the killer.A third person was also arrested at an address in Nice earlier in the morning.

According to reports, the terrorist's ex-wife was being questioned on Friday.

The driver's father has reported that Bouhlel had received psychiatric treatment in the past.He was unknown to the security services.

The Queen added her voice to the wave of sympathy from leaders across the world as the country faced another terrorist attack, following those in Paris in November, in which 130 died, and in January 2015 in which 17 were killed.

President Francois Hollande said 50 people were "between life and death", while several people were among the missing and a "small number" of Britons were injured.

The Foreign Office on Friday night described the carnage as a "terrorist attack", causing multiple casualties, and updated its advice for Britons in Nice.

The new advice said: "If you're in the area, follow the instructions of the French authorities, who have cancelled a number of public events planned for the coming days, closed the Promenade des Anglais and a number of the public beaches in and around Nice, and implemented some traffic restrictions."

A vigil took place at Nice Cathedral on Friday night and mourners also gathered at a makeshift memorial amid a visible police presence near the promenade, which is closed to the public.

when: the evening of 14 July 2016
where:Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France
what: 19 tonne cargo truck was deliberately driven into crowds
keyword:
lorry 貨車
vehicle 車輛
raid 搜捕:襲擊
carnage 大屠殺
vigil 監視