Protesters Rally for Second Night Against Decision in Eric Garner Case

 DECEMBER 5, 2014, 4:22 AM EST

Thousands took the streets and chanted Garner’s last words: “I can’t breathe.”

Thousands of protesters gathered in major U.S. cities for a second night Thursday to rally against the police-involved deaths this year of unarmed black men, just hours after New York’s mayor announced a citywide police retraining program and one day after the news that a white officer would not be indicted in the death of Eric Garner.

A large and rowdy crowd gathered at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, as similar protests popped up in Washington, D.C., Chicago and elsewhere, echoing demonstrations the night earlier. Garner died in July after officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold, an aggressive move that is banned by the New York Police Department.

Wednesday’s grand jury announcement, which came just over a week after a similar outcome in the Ferguson, Mo., case involving teenager Michael Brown, sparked an immediate outcry and led a number of activists and elected officials to demand a federal investigation.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced Wednesday that the Justice Department had opened a civil rights inquiry into the incident, which was caught on video and later went viral.

As footage of the rallies filled news segments Thursday evening, with many protesters chanting Garner’s final words “I can’t breathe,” his mother Gwen Carr opened up about her reaction to the grand jury’s decision not to indict Pantaleo.

“I couldn’t believe that they came back and didn’t come back with probable cause to bring this case to trial. I couldn’t even answer a phone call,” she told CNN. “I just wonder… what video was they watching? Because obviously it wasn’t the one the whole world was watching.”

Carr said she does not accept Pantaleo’s apology. “He was choking him and my son was begging for his life. That was the time for the apology. He should have got up off of him and let him breathe… I would have still had my son,” she added. “He has no regard for human life if this is the way he treats suspects.”

She hopes that Pantaleo will still face charges in federal court.

網址

http://fortune.com/2014/12/05/protesters-rally-for-2nd-night-against-decision-in-eric-garner-case/

導言分析

what: thousands of people took to the streets to protest

who:Eric Garner ,Michael Brown

when:DECEMBER 5, 2014

why: two black people were killed because of over law enforcement

where: Lower Manhattan, Washington, D.C.,Chicago

關鍵字

chokehold 鎖喉

chant 反覆歌頌 

rally 召集

indicted 被..起訴

WHO Declares Zika an International Public Health Emergency

 Justin Worland @justinworland
 Updated: Feb. 1, 2016 2:06 PM  

The World Health Organization declared the spread of Zika and an associated birth defect an international public health emergency Monday, freeing funds to combat the disease.

“This is an extraordinary event,” said WHO Director General Margaret Chan at a press conference Monday. “It poses a public health threat to other parts of the world and a coordinated international response is needed.”

Chan cited the pattern of the disease’s spread, the lack of a vaccine, and the large global population of mosquitoes that can carry the virus as factors that contributed to the declaration.

The declaration, only the fourth in WHO’s history, comes just days after the organization said the total number of cases could hit 4 million by the end of the year. The virus has spread rapidly throughout the Americas infecting people in more than 20 countries. Officials in Brazil, the hardest hit country, have estimated 1.5 million infections. WHO was criticized for waiting months after an Ebola outbreak hit West Africa to declare an international public health emergency in 2014.

Officials noted that their concerns center around a possible relationship between Zika and microcephaly, a birth defect characterized by shrunken heads and brain damage, and not Zika itself. The Zika virus, first discovered in 1957, was thought to be harmless for decades before the link with microcephaly emerged in recent months.

Countries across North and South America have taken precautions to stem the spread for the virus. El Salvador called on women in the country to hold off on pregnancy for two years. The U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued travel warnings for much of Latin America telling pregnant women to avoid the area.

WHO officials said they were not calling for restrictions on travel to affected countries but advised travelers to take precautions to protect themselves from mosquito bites.

網址:

http://time.com/4202499/who-zika-public-health-emergency/?iid=sr-link7

導言分析

what: Zika virus

who: The World Health Organization

when: Feb. 1, 2016

why: Zika virus poses a public health threat  to other part of the world

關鍵字

zika virus 茲卡病毒

mosquitoes 蚊子

microcephaly 小頭畸形症
 hold off 推遲

Oxford’s 2015 Word of the Year Is This Emoji

• Katy Steinmetz @katysteinmetz
 

Updated: Nov. 16, 2015 2:08 PM

It's a historic moment of recognition for little images that have been gaining popularity since 1999

Oxford Dictionaries made history on Monday by announcing that their “Word of the Year” would not be one of those old-fashioned, string-of-letters-type words at all. The flag their editors are planting to sum up who we were in 2015 is this pictograph, an acknowledgement of just how popular these pictures have become in our (digital) daily lives:

“Although emoji have been a staple of texting teens for some time, emoji culture exploded into the global mainstream over the past year,” the company’s team wrote in a press release. “Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.”

Oxford University Press—which publishes both the august Oxford English Dictionary and the lower-brow, more-modern Oxford Dictionaries Online—partnered with keyboard-app company SwiftKey to determine which emoji was getting the most play this past year. According to their data, the “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji, also known as LOL Emoji or Laughing Emoji, comprised nearly 20% of all emoji use in the U.S. and the U.K., where Oxford is based. The runner-up in the U.S., with 9% of usage, was this number:

Caspar Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, explained that their choice reflects the walls-down world that we live in. “Emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders,” he said in a statement. And their choice for the word of the year, he added, embodies the “playfulness and intimacy” that characterizes emoji-using culture.

Though this marks a historic moment of recognition for the pictures plastered throughout tweets and texts, Oxford has not added or defined any emoji in their actual databases. Nor, says a spokesperson for the publisher, do they have plans to do so at this point. The word emoji, however, has been in both the OED and Oxford Dictionaries Online since 2013.

Japanese telecommunications planner Shigetaka Kurita is credited with inventing these little images in 1999, taking the emoticons that had been gaining steam on the Internet to an iconic level. Inspired by comics and street signs, the name for the alphanumeric images comes from combining the Japanese words for picture (e-) and character (moji). “It’s easy to write them off as just silly little smiley faces or thumbs-up,” sociolinguist Ben Zimmer told TIME for a story on how emoji fit into humans’ long history of using pictures to communicate. “But there’s an awful lot of people who are very interested in treating them seriously.”

網址

http://time.com/4114886/oxford-word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/

導言分析

what: word of 2015

who: the''Face With Tears of Joy''emoji

when: Nov. 16, 2015

關鍵字

oxford dictionary 牛津字典

word of the year 年度代表字

emoji 表情符號

embody 體現