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СРСП 1
Тема: снятия лексико-грамматических трудностей
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ТЕКСТ №1
From the steppe to central Spain, Europe echoes to the howl of the wolf
The shepherds' ancient foe is back in numbers – and now packs are breeding a mere 40 miles from Madrid.
Paul Evans
The Observer, Saturday 4 January 2014 19.22 GMT
Spain is now a wolf stronghold. There are thought to be more than 250 breeding groups and more than 2,000 individuals. Photograph: Steven Ruiter/Corbis
A twig snaps, a crow calls, but nothing moves in the dense pine forests of Spain's Guadarrama mountains. Vultures and eagles soar over the snowcapped peaks and wild boars roam the valleys below, as they have for centuries. But for the farmers who work this land, a threatening and worrying comeback is taking place in this timeless landscape, home to Spain's newest national park.
After an absence of 70 years, the wolf is back in the Guadarrama hills and breeding just 40 miles from Madrid.
There have been sightings for several years of lone males, but camera traps recently picked up a family of three cubs, two adults and a juvenile. To the consternation of the farmers who believed that this ancient foe had left the hills for ever, breeding packs are expected to follow. The bloody results are plain to see. In the past two months around 100 sheep and cattle have been killed near Buitrago, in the northern foothills of the Guadarrama mountains, says Juan Carlos Blanco, a wolf specialist and adviser to the Spanish environment ministry.
"Guadarrama can support two, even three, packs. We think there are now six packs within 100km of Madrid. When they arrive in a new area the shepherds do not know what to do. Then they find ways to protect their flocks with dogs or fences. It's a natural event and the wolf will not go away now," he says. "Maybe hunters will exterminate one pack, but others will take its place. Wolves are very flexible and resilient."
Spain is now a wolf stronghold. While the population had diminished to just a few packs in isolated regions in the 1960s, there are now thought to be more than 250 breeding groups and more than 2,000 individuals.
"As wolf numbers grow so does the number of attacks on animals. From 2005 there were about 1,500 attacks a year. Then in 2008 it jumped to over 2,000," says Luis Suárez, WWF biodiversity officer in Madrid. "In the past seven years 13,000 sheep, 200 goats and several hundred cows have been attacked across Spain."
In the 19th century the European wolf was almost driven to extinction as hunters made a living from the bounties paid by villagers. But conservationists are surprised at how fast wolves have returned during recent years, populating areas where they were last seen more than 100 years ago.
Wolf populations in Europe quadrupled between 1970 and 2005 and there may now be 25,000 animals, says the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They have been seen within a few miles of major cities including Berlin, Rome and Athens. Last month one was found near the Dutch hamlet of Luttelgeest, just 30 miles from Holland's densely populated North Sea coast.
They are also reportedly expanding their range in France, Germany, Poland, Scandinavia and Italy, with sightings in Belgium and Denmark. In the past 10 years, says Blanco, wolves have arrived in the Pyrenees from Italy and the Alps. "They have crossed 450km and a lot of roads to get there. So far they are not breeding there, but it's only a matter of time," he says.
In Germany, where they were hunted out of existence in the 19th century, there are now thought to be around 160 wolves in 17 packs in the state of Brandenburg. Cubs were born last year in Heidekreis in Lower Saxony for the first time in 150 years, and there were sightings in the states of Hessen and Rheinland-Pfalz.
"The wolf has been able to reclaim territory in the Alps by crossing over from Italy and it has now spread as far as the Lozère region in central France. In 2012, individuals from the Alpine population formed the first pack in 150 years in the Calanda mountains of Switzerland and four cubs were confirmed to have been born this year," says a report from the Zoological Society of London and others.
Wolves traditionally flourish in times of political and economic crisis. Their return to Europe in the past 20 years is thought to be linked to widespread rural depopulation and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The demise of the USSR saw a near 50% increase in the number of wolves in the 1990s, as animals that had been kept under control by state-sponsored culling were left to roam unchecked and many packs crossed into sparsely populated areas of Poland, Germany and Scandinavia.
Some conservationists say the economic recession in Spain, Portugal, Greece and elsewhere has also helped them spread into new areas. "People have migrated from rural areas, allowing the wolf to reoccupy abandoned land. The recession has left less money for farmers to protect their animals, says Suárez. "More money in the economy means more money for protection. Worse circumstances in the recession have seen a progression of rural people to the cities and an increase in wolf numbers," he says.
"Land is being abandoned. The woods regrow, so there are more deer, less hunting pressure, and more food for wolves," says Peter Taylor, British ecologist and editor of Rewilding journal, who lives in the Czech Republic. "Wolves are returning to many of their old haunts in Europe and also wandering into long-forgotten territory. There are breeding pairs now in Germany, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Croatia, Alpine Italy, the Apennines and Alpine France," he says.
"Wolves have always been hated by country people, but they do not threaten people," says Blanco, who expects to see numbers continue to grow in the next decade. "We must help farmers tolerate them," he says. But the image of the wolf as a danger to be exterminated is strong in countries to which it has recently returned. Its re-emergence has pitted conservationists against farmers furious that wolves are killing their livestock.
"It leads to resentment among older people left in villages where the young have moved to the cities," says Taylor. "In contrast to lynx and bear, nobody has tried to reintroduce wolves – they just wander in. They are seldom welcome. They remind older people of hard times – a sign that civilisation is slipping backwards perhaps."
Wolves are a protected species and most countries offer to compensate farmers for the animals they kill. But many are now being hunted illegally and poisoned. Farmers and shepherds invest in fences and fierce dogs to protect their animals, says Taylor. "They have lost the habit of defending their flocks. In areas where wolves never disappeared, they have always had some losses, but they are used to protection. Farmers are more desperate because the prices they get are low."
Suárez adds: "Officially, 130 wolves have been killed [since 2005] in Spain, but the real numbers are unknown. They are being poisoned."
María Vázquez, who works with farm advice group Asaja in Aviola, helping farmers with electric fences and dogs, says: "We're not against wolves, but we need help. The number of attacks on livestock is growing."
As their populations grow, the wolves' best friends may be tourists flocking to Guadarrama and other conservation zones. The animals' presence just a few miles from city centres is proving popular with politicians and a draw to city residents. Visitor numbers to Guadarrama and other wild areas in Europe where wolves have moved in are growing fast, and governments are mostly happy to invest in modest protection measures in return for being hailed as friends of the environment.
"Their return to Guadarrama is a good thing, but for people with animals it's trouble. We are willing to pay subsidies," says Spain's environment secretary, Federico Ramos. "We have to understand that ideas about the wolf are changing. In the past they were a serious problem, but now people are sympathetic. It's not the devil; it's just an animal. We must learn to live together.
СРСП 2
Тема: снятия лексико-грамматических трудностей
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ТЕКСТ №2
Venezuela's Economy Will Continue To Suffer In 2014: Analysts Predict Further Recession And Devaluation Of The Bolivar
By Patricia Rey Mallén
International Business Times, January 10 2014 3:40 PM
If there were an award for the messiest year in Latin America, Venezuela would win it by a landslide. Currency problems, drastic shortages and political wars marked a 2013 that began with the death of Comandante Hugo Chávez in early March. Since then, successor and current President NicolásMaduro has been trying to carry on his legacy at any cost -- and many fear that is bringing the country close to collapse.
Whether Maduro's failing policies or the so-called “economic war” Maduro is accusing his opposition of waging are to blame, Venezuela entered a recession in 2013. GDP suffered a 0.4 percent contraction this year, according to estimates by Trading Economics. This, in a year when Venezuela dealt with 42 percent inflation, and the Venezuelan bolívar dropped 32 percent against the U.S. dollar.
However, the government has inaugurated a reform agenda that might put the country back on track in 2014.
GDP growth
Maduro's government presented its budget proposal for 2014 on Tuesday, based on steady economic growth and inflation slowing considerably -- an optimistic outlook.
Finance Minister Nelson Merentes said at the presentation that the $87 billion budget targeted GDP growth of 4 percent. “Some people laugh,” said Merentes, “But the people know that this government knows how to solve difficult problems.”
It was assumed that Merentes was addressing the opposition, led by Henrique Capriles, but he could have just as well be addressing the international community. Not even the most upbeat forecast predicts growth that high. The United Nations, through the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, predicts growth of a mere 1 percent, as does Trading Economics.
Local analysts are not even that forgiving: Caracas-based think tank Síntesis Financiera predicted another year of recession: 2014 would see the economy shrink 2.5 percent.
Inflation
During the presentation of the budget, Merentes said that inflation this year will be at a rate between 26 percent and 28 percent.
However, independent analysts believe the real number might be well above that. Johns Hopkins University Professor Steve Hanke calculated that real inflation might be in the triple digits, with a 283 percent implied annual inflation rate for 2013.
Tackling such hyperinflation will be one of Maduro’s biggest challenges. Trading Economics predicts it will go down, however not by as much as the government says: By the end of this year, the rate will be 31 percent. On the other hand, Síntesis Financiera predicts inflation will actually skyrocket to over 50 percent in the next 12 months.
Currency
The Venezuelan bolívar had the dubious honor of being the most devalued Latin American currency of 2013. The official rate against the dollar dropped a whopping 31.72 percent in the last 12 months, bringing the exchange to 6.3 bolívares per $1.
The budget maintains the official exchange rate at 6.3 per dollar, fixed by the government’s tight controls, though the actual rate is double on the black market.
Analyst agree on this matter, saying that the bolívar will continue to drop in the next 12 months. Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F), which released its outlook for 2014 on Wednesday, expects the currency to drop to an official rate of 12 bolívares per dollar, which could mean a $350 million hit for the company as as result.
Tamara Herrera at Síntesis Financiera told Caracas newspaper El Universal that the Venezuelan Foreign Exchange Administration Commission will resort to selling foreign currency at two different rates: The current exchange of 6.3 per dollar will be kept for basic imports, whereas remaining items will be imported at an exchange of 12 bolívares per dollar.
СРСП 3
Тема: Чтение и перевод заголовка
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ТЕКСТ №3
France Likely To Pass 'Anti-Amazon' Law Aimed At Helping Traditional Bookstores Compete
By Meagan Clark
International Business Times, January 10 2014 11:59 AM
A view inside Shakespeare and Company, a famous bookstore in Paris. CreativeCommons
France’s National Assembly looks likely to pass a so-called “anti-Amazon” law in the next few days, a law that would force Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and other online booksellers to charge for shipping in hopes of protecting the country’s 2,500 independent bookstores.
Since 1981, France’s Lang Law has fixed prices on books set by publishers that bookstores, supermarkets and other retailers may discount by no more than 5 percent. Then-Minister of Culture Jack Lang drafted the law to protect independent bookstores from supermarket chains. That was before Amazon, Fnac, France’s largest retail chain, and others entered the market through the Internet.
Amazon and Fnac have been pricing books 5 percent below the publisher’s price, like many bookstores. But they’ve also offered free shipping on all book orders at any time, to complaints of unfair competition from bookstores.
The National Assembly and the Senate both passed versions of the “anti-Amazon” law that now only has to pass one more vote from the assembly to become law. Since the text has only slightly been modified, it is likely to pass.
That will mean online retailers will have to choose between free shipping and the 5 percent discount. If they choose to discount 5 percent, they must charge for shipping. If they choose free shipping, they cannot discount the book price.
Whether the French will be able to save their bookstores is not clear. Just last month, France’s second biggest bookstore chain, Chapitre, filed for bankruptcy. In 2014, $12.3 million of French taxes will go toward the book industry to shield it from online competition.
The law could also influence other European nations that have adopted similar laws to France's Lang Law, including Italy, Germany, Portugal and Spain.
СРСП 4
Тема: Чтение и перевод заголовка
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ТЕКСТ №4
Sorry — but Pope Francis is no liberal
Trendy commentators have fallen in love with a pope of their own invention
Luke Coppen
The Spectator, 11 January 2014
On the last day of 2013, one of the weirdest religious stories for ages appeared on the news wires. The Vatican had officially denied that Pope Francis intended to abolish sin. It sounded like a spoof, but wasn’t. Who had goaded the Vatican into commenting on something so improbable? It turned out to be one of Italy’s most distinguished journalists: Eugenio Scalfari, co-founder of the left-wing newspaperLa Repubblica, who had published an article entitled ‘Francis’s Revolution: he has abolished sin’.
Why would anyone, let alone a very highly regarded thinker and writer like Scalfari, believe the Pope had done away with such a basic tenet of Christian theology? Well, since he took charge last year, Francis has been made into a superstar of the liberal left. His humble background (he is a former bouncer), his dislike for the trappings of office (he cooks his own spaghetti) and his emphasis on the church’s concern for the poor has made liberals, even atheists like Scalfari, suppose that he is as hostile to church dogma as they are. They assume, in other words, that the Pope isn’t Catholic. Last year few left-leaning commentators could resist falling for the foot-washing Jesuit from Buenos Aires. In column after column they projected their deepest hopes on to Francis — he is, they think, the man who will finally bring enlightened liberal values to the Catholic church.
In November Guardian writer Jonathan Freedland argued that Francis was ‘the obvious new hero of the left’ and that portraits of the Supreme Pontiff should replace fading Obama posters on ‘the walls of the world’s student bedrooms’. Just days later Francis preached a homily denouncing what he called ‘adolescent progressivism’, but people see and hear what they want to, so no one took any notice of that.
That is how the Pope has come to be spun as a left-liberal idol. Whenever he proves himself loyal to Catholic teaching — denouncing abortion, for instance, or saying that same-sex marriage is an ‘anthropological regression’ — his liberal fan base turns a deaf ear. Last month America’s oldest gay magazine, the Advocate, hailed Francis as its person of the year because of the compassion he had expressed towards homosexuals. It was hardly a revolution: Article 2358 of the Catholic church’s catechism calls for gay people to be treated with ‘respect, compassion and sensitivity’. In simply restating Catholic teaching, however, Francis was hailed as a hero. When a Maltese bishop said the Pope had told him he was ‘shocked’ by the idea of gay adoption, that barely made a splash. Time magazine, too, made Francis person of the year, hailing him for his ‘rejection of Church dogma’ — as if he had declared that from now on there would be two rather than three Persons of the Holy Trinity. But for cockeyed lionisation of Francis it would be hard to beat the editors of Esquire, who somehow managed to convince themselves that a figure who wears the same outfit every day was the best dressed man of 2013.
Some pundits have noticed the gulf between what you might call the Fantasy Francis — the figure conjured up by liberal imagination — and the actual occupant of the Chair of St Peter. James Bloodworth, editor of the political blog Left Foot Forward, recently urged his journalistic allies to show some restraint. ‘Pope Francis’s position on most issues should make the hair of every liberal curl,’ he wrote. ‘Instead we get article after article of saccharine from people who really should know better.’
Is Bloodworth’s remark a sign of a coming secular backlash against the new Pope? For a while, it seemed inevitable that the new Pope’s fans would come to realise he is not about to bless women bishops, condom use, gay marriage and abortion — and then they would turn on him. Now, that seems unlikely. Having invented the Fantasy Francis, his liberal well-wishers may never want to kill off their creation.
Consider the Obama analogy. Like Francis, the US president was a telegenic figure who followed an unpopular predecessor with a promise of radical change. Like Francis, he rose to worldwide prominence with incredible speed, bringing a complicated personal history that could be read in multiple ways. And like Francis, he inspired an almost eerie consensus among the commentariat. The most influential media outlets decided he was essentially a decent guy and judged him thereafter on his intentions rather than his achievements, blamed his failures largely on his enemies and backed him whenever he needed it most. Francis is not, of course, the new Obama, but he enjoys the same charmed relationship with journalists. Yes, the honeymoon will end, as it did with the president, but this looks like the start of a happy, lifelong marriage.
There’s only one case I can think of in which the media would turn on Francis: in the unlikely event that his private character were dramatically at odds with his public persona. He would have to be caught, say, building a death ray in the Vatican Gardens. (Even then some outlets would present it in the best possible light: ‘Pope Francis develops radical cure for human suffering.’)
Journalists also have a clear economic motive for sticking with the Fantasy Francis narrative: people will pay to read about it. After all, he was the most discussed person on the internet last year. Post a cute photo of him hugging a child, or posing for a ‘selfie’ with young admirers in the Vatican, and you’ll see a satisfying spike in page views. Francis has become one of the world’s most reliable online commodities. What sensible hack would want to threaten that?
Actually, Pope Francis has already survived a secular backlash. Barely an hour after he first appeared on the balcony above St Peter’s Square last March, the editor of the Guardian tweeted: ‘Was Pope Francis an accessory to murder and false imprisonment?’ The answer was ‘no’, of course. But allegations about Francis’s behaviour during Argentina’s Dirty War featured in bulletins for the next 24 hours, before fizzling out. The backlash lasted one entire news cycle. The idea of a left-wing pope, who had come to tear down the temple he inherited, turned out to be a far better story.
‘I’d like the usual savage Tory cut.’
Perhaps the real challenge for the Pope this year will come from a different quarter. In his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Francis criticised ‘trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice’. In classic Vatican style, that was a mistranslation of the original Spanish, which rejected the theory that ‘economic growth, encouraged by a free market alone’, would ensure more justice.
Such nuances didn’t concern the American conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who accused the Pontiff of espousing ‘pure Marxism’. Clearly this was just another version of the Fantasy Francis — a misapprehension of the man and his message that the Catholic hierarchy has done little to correct. But there is a price to be paid in allowing such myths to grow — a price that may have been paid, for example, by the Archdiocese of New York, which may have lost a seven-figure donation. According to Ken Langone, who is trying to raise $180 million to restore the city’s Catholic cathedral, one potential donor said he was so offended by the Pope’s alleged comments that he was reluctant to chip in.
Under Francis, the church is deeply committed to what theologians call ‘the preferential option for the poor’. But in order to opt for the poor, the church has to court the super-rich. A few generous multi-millionaires, for example, fund most of the major Catholic initiatives in England and Wales (including a significant part of Benedict XVI’s state visit in 2010). If just one of them was put off by the distorted ‘Marxist’ image of Francis, the church here would be in trouble.
Of course if those who caricature the church as bigoted and uncaring are forced to take a second look, then Pope Francis can claim he is doing his job. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, says that Roman Catholicism had been ‘out-marketed’ by its Hollywood critics — but now Pope Francis is changing the tone, without changing the substance.
But while the Pontiff has succeeded in appealing to those outside the church, his boldness has upset some within it. The Vatican analyst John Allen describes this as the Pope’s ‘older son problem’ — a reference to the parable of the Prodigal Son, in which the faithful brother gripes when his father welcomes back the wayward one. Allen writes that ‘Francis basically has killed the fatted calf for the prodigal sons and daughters of the postmodern world, reaching out to gays, women, non-believers, and virtually every other constituency inside and outside the church that has felt alienated.’ But some Catholics feel Francis is taking their loyalty for granted. ‘In the Gospel parable,’ Allen notes, ‘the father eventually notices his older son’s resentment and pulls him aside to assure him: “Everything I have is yours.” At some stage, Pope Francis may need to have such a moment with his own older sons (and daughters).’
You might think: why bother? The Pope should be focused on reaching out to the alienated, rather than on tending his followers’ wounded egos and stressing that he has not come to tear down Catholic teaching. But Francis needs an eager workforce if he is to realise his beautiful vision of the church as ‘a field hospital after battle’.
Catholics are having just as much trouble as everyone else distinguishing the real Francis. Just last week a devout, well–informed laywoman asked me if it was true that Francis had denied the existence of hell. It turned out that the Pope had overturned 2,000 years of Christian teaching at the end of the ‘Third Vatican Council’ — as reported exclusively by the ‘largely satirical’ blog Diversity Chronicle.
The true Francis will be moving fast throughout this year. The 77-year-old knows he must quickly finish the financial reforms launched by his predecessor Benedict XVI, overhaul the Roman Curia (which liberals and conservatives agree is in desperate need of reform), impose rigorous global norms on the handling of clerical sex abuse cases, continue to press for peace in Syria, nudge Israelis and Palestinians closer to an agreement during his Holy Land visit and oversee a contentious synod of bishops that could shift the Church’s approach to divorced and remarried Catholics.
Meanwhile, the Fantasy Francis will continue to throw out dogmas, agitate for class war and set trends in men’s fashion. But don’t be fooled: this is as much of a media-driven illusion as the idea that the Catholic church is obsessed by sex and money. What matters is what the real Francis says and does. And that should be more interesting than even the most gripping invention.
Luke Coppen is editor of the Catholic Herald.
СРСП 5
Тема: Перевод подписей под фотографиями
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ТЕКСТ № 5
The Invisible Land Of Kurdistan: Iraq Oil, Turkish EU Membership, Could Lead To Official Recognition
By Avedis Hadjian
International Business Times, January 10 2014 1:46 PM
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey -- The sound of Turkish military jets taking off to unknown destinations no longer disturbs the sleep of Abdullah Demirbaş. Four years ago, at the age of 16, his son joined the PKK, the acronym of the Kurdish Workers’ Party, a guerrilla group that has been fighting against the Turkish state since the late 1970s. For decades, the planes were headed to target PKK positions in the mountains. These days, the fighters carry out surveillance missions, patrolling Turkey’s air space near the Syria and Iraq borders. They are no longer attacking the guerrillas as a peace process between the Turkish government and the Kurdish independence movement slowly unfolds.
Demirbaş, the mayor of the Sur district of Diyarbakır -- the second-largest city in southeast Turkey’s Anatolia region and the unofficial Kurdish capital -- hasn't seen his son since he “went to the mountains,” as the locals euphemistically say when referring to someone who takes up arms for Kurdistan.
A few months ago, Demirbaş’ other son was called to compulsory Turkish military service, which means that if fighting between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish army resumes, his family will be among many who could find themselves with sons in opposing camps.
For now, Demirbaş and other Kurds who have no appetite for war take comfort in the dialogue under way since 2012 between the Turkish government and the imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, even if the government’s overtures are an effort to make the country more attractive for membership in the European Union. Nonetheless, the Kurdish issue remains volatile, in Turkey and in neighboring countries with sizeable Kurdish populations, and is complicated by changing economics, including urban migrations of rural Kurds and the increasing extraction of oil and gas reserves in Kurdish Iraq.
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters stand in formation in northern Iraq, May 14, 2013. The first group of Kurdish militants to withdraw from Turkey under a peace process were greeted in northern Iraq by comrades from the PKK, in a symbolic step toward ending a three-decades-old insurgency. Reuters/Umit Bektas
Kurds have long been described as the biggest nation of the world without a state. Though they claim as one of their sons legendary Muslim leader Saladin, who fought the Crusaders and reconquered Palestine from the Europeans in the 12th century, Kurds have never had a country of their own. An estimated 20 million to 25 million Kurds live in Turkey, making up about one-quarter of the country’s population. What percentage they comprise of the total population of the geopolitical region of Kurdistan isn't precisely known. Kurdistan is a mountainous region spreading over sections of five nations -- Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and a small portion of Armenia. Kurd separatists, including the PKK, want their own country, or at the least an autonomous sub-state. For centuries, Kurdish uprisings and attempts to create such a state have been brutally suppressed, especially by the Turkish government as well as the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, which carried out a massacre with chemical weapons in the northern Iraq city of Halabja in 1988, estimated to have caused up to 5,000 deaths.
In 1983, Kurdish provinces in Turkey were placed under martial law in response to PKK activity, which prompted a guerrilla war that continued into the 1990s. Thousands of Kurdish-populated villages were destroyed and numerous assassinations, kidnappings and executions were reportedly carried out by both sides. More than 37,000 people died and hundreds of thousands more were forced to leave their homes. In those days, Turkish security operatives drove white Renault 12 sedans, the mere sight of which caused locals to scatter, and there are still dozens of “disappeared” whose fates are unknown. “Nobody knows their number and what happened to them,” observed Raci Bilici, president of Diyarbakır’s Human Rights Association.
War and its aftermath always carry unintended consequences, and one outcome of the Iraq war was the emergence of an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq along the border with Turkey, which now functions as a semi-independent state under the leadership of Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Regional Government and head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. For now, it's unclear how the massive exodus of Kurdish refugees from the Syrian war will influence politics there, or elsewhere.
A view of the new refugee camp on the outskirts of the city of Arbil in Iraq's Kurdistan region, Aug. 20, 2013. Reuters/Thaier al-Sudani
Meanwhile, in an unexpected turn of events, the concept of Kurdistan found an ally of convenience in the form of its erstwhile enemy -- the Turkish government and its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A harsh populist on the outside -- Erdoğan can also be a canny pragmatist, and at the risk of alienating nationalist Turks -- who resent Kurdish demands and whose suspicions of foreign and domestic conspiracies to break the country apart date back to the fading days of the Ottoman Empire. Erdoğan in November joined Barzani in Diyarbakır for an unprecedented summit meeting, to discuss energy cooperation as well as to resume a faltering dialogue that the PKK and its political branch, the Peace and Democracy Party, described as in a "coma.’’
The prime minister even broke a taboo by referring to Iraq’s Kurdish region as “Kurdistan.” In the words of Al Monitor’s columnist Cengiz Çandar, “If a Turkish nationalist had seen this in a dream, he would not have recovered from this nightmare for a long time.” And in a land where the government for a long time dismissed Kurds as being “mountain Turks” -- not recognizing their separate identity -- Erdoğan extended an olive branch, saying that “rejection, denial and assimilation have ended with our government.” He made clear, however, that his notion of Kurdistan stopped at the border: “We have a unitary nation, a unitary flag, a unitary land and a unitary state,” Erdoğan said at his speech in Diyarbakır. “We don't have any toleration to the people who want to divide Turkey.”
Turkey’s overtures toward the Kurds are in part driven by the thriving country’s thirst for energy. With almost no energy resources of its own, Turkey must purchase all of its oil and gas from outside sources -- the country’s energy imports hit $60 billion last year. Oil imports make up between 7 and 12 percent of Turkey’s GDP, comparable to South Korea’s outlays in energy imports. That makes both countries especially vulnerable to spikes in oil prices. But whereas every $10 increase in oil barrel prices would cut South Korea’s GDP by 0.8 percent, or about a $1 billion increase in its account deficit, according to Morgan Stanley, in the case of Turkey the same price increase would add another $4 billion to its current account deficit of $51.9 billion.
During a visit to Japan on Tuesday, Erdoğan blamed the trade gap on oil and gas imports. Consequently, Turkey is desperate to gain access to the Iraqi Kurds’ oil reserves, estimated at 45 billion barrels, and natural gas holdings of at least 106 trillion cubic feet. After the Erdoğan-Barzani meeting, there were reports that oil would start flowing from Iraqi Kurdistan into Turkey “before the end of the year,” though for now the pipelines remain unused.
The reason: The Kurdish regional government’s moves toward an independent oil policy triggered a warning not only from Baghdad but also from the U.S. government urging the Kurdish regional government not to exceed its autonomy powers. But with Iraq now battling al-Qaeda-linked groups and Sunni Muslims growing increasingly restive in the country’s West, Iraqi Kurdistan, which is prosperous and relatively safe, has the upper hand. The regional capital, Erbil, was described as a “mini-Dubai” by Mehmet Taniş, a Kurdish businessman based in the Turkish city of Şırnak, near the Iraqi border -- not due to magnificent skyscrapers (which the city doesn’t have) but because of its newfound wealth.
Some say the Kurdish regional government plans to use oil money to pave the way for a sovereign state, and ironically, many Turkish Kurds are apprehensive about such a possibility, whether due to their own great expectations or fears of resumed conflict. Still, Şeyhmus Diken, a Diyarbakır-based Kurdish writer and civil rights activist, says the political thinking of Kurds has evolved into a more realistic model for a freer union in Turkey.
“The goal in the beginning was the union of the four parts of Kurdistan [Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria] into a single, independent state, based on a Marxist conception of people’s liberation,” Diken said. “What we are pursuing now is a federal state model that grants more freedoms and autonomous rights to every citizen of this country, from the Marmara region to Southeastern Anatolia.”
One PKK insider, who spoke with International Business Times in Diyarbakir on condition of anonymity, concurred with Diken’s analysis. “The PKK is not nationalist,” he said, pointing out that the region of Kurdistan is itself less contained than it once was. “Kurds are all over Turkey -- in Istanbul, in Ankara, in Bursa, everywhere,” he said. “What would be the borders of such a country?” He said the dispersal was largely the result of the war of the 1990s and the exodus of Kurds to larger Turkish cities for economic opportunities.
And he noted that Turkey has made strides toward accommodating Kurds, especially since the peace talks with Öcalan began. Kurdish language news is now broadcast freely over the airwaves and the language is used alongside Turkish in local agencies and municipalities in the southeast -- no small feat considering that both were illegal only a few years ago. Kurdish music blares from stores in the streets of Diyarbakır, where the pictures of militant icons and, to a lesser extent, Kurdish flags, are conspicuously displayed.
Contrast that with the experience of Ebre Deniz (not her real name) who in the late 1980s, at age 19, overheard her grandparents whispering in a strange language in their kitchen one evening at the home they shared in Istanbul. Deniz was stunned to later find that they were speaking in Kurmanji, the most commonly spoken Kurdish language, and that her family was Kurdish yet had not told her so out of fear.
Soon after, she fell in love with a Kurdish militant at her university and took up arms for the PKK in the mountains not far from Diyarbakır. She stayed for two years until one winter morning when the guerilla group’s mountain camp came under attack from Turkish gunships and she saw two teenagers blown to pieces by artillery. Shell-shocked, she was allowed to return home to Istanbul, but guilt ate away at her, so two years later she got back in touch with other militants by telephone. As she was walking toward their re-encounter, not far from Gezi Park, she claims undercover agents grabbed her and forced her into a van, covered her head with a cloth bag and beat her. She spent the next 10 years at Istanbul’s notorious Bayrampaşa prison, where she claims she was repeatedly tortured.
Now based in Istanbul, Deniz dreams of an autonomous Kurdistan -- part of a reformed, federative state, “one that is free and equal for everyone, Turks, Kurds, Armenians.”
But even that limited Kurdish state seems unrealistic to another Diyarbakır resident, a musician who gave only his first name, Engin. He says that ethnic hatred of the Kurds isn't easing as quickly as some would believe.
“Just the colors are changing,” he said. “The state structure remains the same, and it’s still repressive.”
Riot police use tear gas to disperse pro-Kurdish demonstrators in the southeastern Turkish town of Nusaybin who are upset over plans to build a wall along the Turkish-Syrian border, Nov. 7, 2013. Reuters
The day Engin spoke with IBTimes, on Jan. 7, military prosecutors decided not to press charges for what is known as the Roboski Massacre, an attack by Turkish jets on a group of civilians that left 34 dead in the Kurdish Şırnak province, across the border from Iraq. The decision was met with outrage in Diyarbakır and other Kurdish-majority cities. Turkish authorities claimed they mistook the villagers -- most of them teenagers -- for PKK guerrillas, when in fact they were smuggling cigarettes and other items into Turkey from northern Iraq. That begged the question: What if they had, in fact, been PKK guerillas? In that case, what would the military’s actions indicate about the government’s peaceful overtures toward the Kurds?
Fehim Işık, an Istanbul-based Kurdish author and analyst, said Turkey must develop a comprehensive approach to meeting Kurdish demands for equal rights as a nation, which have been held in check for centuries. “Unless there is a permanent solution for the Kurdish-inhabited parts in Turkey and the region, all solutions will be temporary in nature,” Işık said.
People sit in the back of a truck as they celebrate what they said was the liberation of villages from Islamist rebels near the city of Ras al-Ain in the Syrian province of Hasakah, after capturing it from Islamist rebels, Nov. 6, 2013. Reuters
СРСП 6
Тема: Перевод подписей под фотографиями
Методические указания:
1. Найдите слова и выражения, которые являются ключевыми
2. Объясните кто или что изображено на фото после прочтения статьи
3. Объясните какому событию посвящена иллюстрация
МАТЕРИАЛ ДЛЯ РАБОТЫ:
ТЕКСТ №6
Jail for man who wore Ku Klux Klan outfit and posed with lynched golliwog
Ex-National Front member Christopher Philips gets 12 months for distributing visual images intended to stir racial hatred
Steven Morris
The Guardian, Wednesday 8 January 2014 16.42 GMT
Christopher Philips admitted loading a video to YouTube, above, showing figures clad in Ku Klux Klan costumes hanging a life-size golliwog. Photograph: SWNS/Newsteam
A university graduate who posted footage of himself online dressed in a Ku Klux Klan costume hanging a life-sized golliwog doll has been jailed for 12 months.
Christopher Philips, a 24-year-old kickboxing tutor who was drummed out of the National Front, reportedly because his views were considered too extreme, wore the white robes and hood at a far-right demonstration and at a music gig.
He was arrested by counter-terrorism officers after footage of him in the costume – which was purchased from Florida – was posted on YouTube and appeared on Facebook.
The sentencing judge at Wolverhampton crown court, John Warner, told Philips that citizens were allowed to hold extreme and offensive views but could not disseminate material intended to stir up racial unrest. The judge told Philips, who has Asperger syndrome, that the images were so inflammatory there was no choice but for him to be jailed.
Warner also made Philips the subject of an anti-social behaviour order banning him from attending extremist events, posting or distributing extremist or racist material, putting up racist posters and making racist gestures.
Prosecuting, Simon Davies said that on 9 March last year Philips went to a far-right White Pride World Wide demonstration in Swansea. Later he attended a music event at the Valley Commando Motorcycle Club, at Abercynon, near Pontypridd, where he was photographed and filmed in the KKK outfit.
On 12 March three videos showing a man in a KKK outfit were posted on YouTube and later appeared on Facebook. Two weeks later police from the West Midlands counter-terrorism unit raided Philips' home and seized a laptop and white KKK outfit.
Police also found a flag bearing the slogan White Pride World Wide, and a copy of a letter to a German acquaintance of Philips from the Norwegian far-right extremist and mass murderer Anders Breivik.
During his police interview Philips told officers: "I just feel stronger towards my own; my own ethnic group – white people." He admitted posting the video footage, filmed by a friend, then sending the links so the footage could be seen by his friends.
He told detectives he "didn't even think about anybody who might be offended" but had just wanted to impress his friends.
Philips admitted distributing a recording of visual images intended to stir up racial hatred. Warner told him: "It does not require advanced education or knowledge of history to know what you were seeking to convey might cause offence."
The judge described the defendant's admiration for the notorious figures of the Ku Klux Klan as "abhorrent". Warner also flagged up a manifesto in which Philips had claimed that democracy had been a failure and what was needed was a dictatorship, with him as the leader.
Warner continued: "In our democracy people are allowed to hold extreme, bizarre and offensive views." But citizens were not allowed to disseminate material that was threatening or offensive and likely to stir up racial hatred.
Philips, who also belonged to a group called the West Midlands Infidels, was described as a man with no friends by his defence barrister, Theresa Starr.
She said: "He had no friends, and was bullied at a special school for pupils with Asperger's. He went to university and made no friends. He then developed this interest, which led him to end up in this court."
Starr added: "He believed the only people who admired him were his nationalist friends, which is why he behaved in that manner."
Philips used a string of offensive pseudonyms for various online postings. On one he wrote: "I am a Wasp (white Anglo-Saxon protestant) who is English as far back as my ancestry can be traced. Therefore I am an indigenous native to these British Isles … I am still 100% white and of the Adamic race. All white people are descended from Adam and Eve."
At an earlier hearing Philips made a white supremacist gesture as he left court.
СРСП 7
Тема: обобщение информации представленной в статье
Методические указания:
Составьте вопросы к тексту
Найдите в тексте предложения, подтверждающие основную мысль
Найдите в тексте предложения, помогающие понять заголовок
Составьте план прочитанного текста
Назовите наиболее интересные факты и фрагменты текста
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ТЕКСТ №7
Forget artificial intelligence. It's artificial idiocy we need to worry about
Machines are good at some things and OK at others, but completely useless when it comes to understanding
Tom Chatfield
The Guardian, Monday 6 January 2014 15.00 GMT
If a computer could learn to identify you with absolute accuracy, would that mean it knew what it means to be you? Photograph: Carsten Koall/AFP/Getty Images
Massive, inconceivable numbers are commonplace in conversations about computers. The exabyte, a one followed by 18 zeroes worth of bytes; the petaflop, one quadrillion calculations performed in a single second. Beneath the surface of our lives churns an ocean of information, from whose depths answers and optimisations ascend like munificent kraken.
This is the much-hyped realm of "big data": unprecedented quantities of information generated at unprecedented speed, in unprecedented variety.
From particle physics to predictive search and aggregated social media sentiments, we reap its benefits across a broadening gamut of fields. We agonise about over-sharing while the numbers themselves tick upwards. Mostly, though, we fail to address a handful of questions more fundamental even than privacy. What are machines good at; what are they less good at; and when are their answers worse than useless?
Consider cats. As commentators like the American psychologist Gary Marcus have noted, it's extremely difficult to teach a computer to recognise cats. And that's not for want of trying. Back in the summer of 2012, Google fed 10 million feline-featuring images (there's no shortage online) into a massively powerful custom-built system. The hope was that the alchemy of big data would do for images what it has already done for machine translation: that an algorithm could learn from a sufficient number of examples to approximate accurate solutions to the question "what is that?"
Sadly, cats proved trickier than words. Although the system did develop a rough measure of "cattiness", it struggled with variations in size, positioning, setting and complexity. Once expanded to encompass 20,000 potential categories of object, the identification process managed just 15.8% accuracy: a huge improvement on previous efforts, but hardly a new digital dawn.
If computers remain far worse than us at image recognition, a certain over-confident combination of man and machine can elsewhere take inaccuracy to a whole new level. As arch-pollster Nate Silver noted in his 2012 book The Signal and the Noise, many data-crunching models have a terrible record when it comes to predictions – and their designers only tend to realise this when it's too late."There are entire disciplines in which predictions have been failing, often at great cost to society," Silver argues, with fields at fault including biomedical research, national security, financial and economic modelling, political science and seismology. The Fukushima nuclear facility was designed to withstand what plenty of experts predicted was the worst possible scenario. Instead, it revealed the tragic divide between their models' versions of "worst" and reality's.
Identifying cats is a far cry from predicting the future. Yet they share a common feature: that the processes underpinning them are not something we are able fully to explain to either machines or ourselves.
This wouldn't matter if every data-led undertaking was, like Google's cat-spotting exercise, conducted as an experiment, with clear criteria for failure, success and incremental improvement. Instead, though, the banality of phrases like "big data" tends to conceal a semantic switcheroo, in which the results a system generates are considered an impartial representation of the world – or worse, an appealingly predictable substitute for mere actuality.
Yet there's no such thing as impartial information any more than there's a way of measuring someone's height without selecting a unit of measurement. Every single byte of data on earth was made, not found. And each was manufactured according to methods whose biases are baked into their very being.
When Facebook asks me what I "like", it's making the convenient assumption that I feel one of two ways about everything in the world – indifferent or affectionate. When it aggregates the results of mine and a billion other responses, marvellous insights emerge. But these remain based on a model of preference that might kindly be called moronic, and that is more likely to provide profitable profiling for marketing purposes than to transform our understanding of the human mind.
Similarly, every measurement embodies a series of choices: what to include, what to exclude. If a computer could learn to recognise images of cats with absolute accuracy, would that mean it knew what a cat was? Not unless you redefined cats as silent, immobile, odourless sequences of information describing two-dimensional images. If a computer could learn to identify you with absolute accuracy via surreptitiously scraped data from your social media presence, phone calls and banking activities, would that mean it knew what it means to be you? Not unless you redefined a person as a series of traceable numbers monitored ceaselessly by a series of machines. Which, of course, sounds like an excellent idea to some people.
Perhaps the greatest illusion that a phrase like big data embodies, then, is that information is ever separate from life. "Personal data" sounds so much less personal than those things it touches on: conversations, meetings, trips, possessions, earnings, relationships, beliefs, self-expression. Yet there is no place where it ends and the real us begins. We are, among other things, what the world believes and permits us to be – a negotiation that demands flexibility on both sides.
As those in the business of selling computers enjoy pointing out, 90% of the data in existence was produced in the last few years. Yet it seems unlikely that we're now nine times smarter than everyone else who ever lived – while all one billion bad assumptions make for is one really big, really bad answer. Forget artificial intelligence – in the brave new world of big data, it's artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.
• This article was amended on 7 January 2014. An earlier version referred to the exabyte as 18 zeroes worth of bits rather than bytes.
СРСП 8
Тема: обобщение информации представленной в статье
Методические указания:
Составьте вопросы к тексту
Найдите в тексте предложения, подтверждающие мысль ,что …
Найдите в тексте предложения, помогающие понять заголовок
Найдите предложения, передающие основную мысль статьи
Составьте план прочитанного текста
Назовите наиболее интересные факты и фрагменты текста
МАТЕРИАЛ ДЛЯ РАБОТЫ:
ТЕКСТ №8
Black rhino hunt permit brings $350,000 at controversial auction
Protests greet sale by Dallas hunting club of papers allowing holder to kill rare specimen in Namibia
Associated Press in Dallas
The Guardian, Sunday 12 January 2014 05.53 GMT
A protest outside the Dallas Convention Centre against the auction of a black rhino hunting permit.Photograph: TonyGutierrez/AP
A permit to hunt an endangered African black rhino sold for $350,000 at a Dallas auction held to raise money for conservation efforts but criticised by wildlife advocates.
Steve Wagner, a spokesman for the Dallas Safari Club, which sponsored the closed-door event Saturday night, confirmed the sale of the permit for a hunt in the African nation of Namibia. He declined to name the buyer.
The Safari Club's executive director, Ben Carter, has defended the auction, saying all money raised will go toward protecting the species. He also said the rhino that the winner will be allowed to hunt is old, male and nonbreeding and that the animal was likely to be targeted for removal anyway because it was becoming aggressive and threatening other wildlife.
But the auction drew howls from critics, including wildlife and animal rights groups, and the FBI said it was investigating death threats against members of the club.
Officials from the Humane Society and the International Fund for Animal Welfare have said that while culling can be appropriate in abundant animal populations, all black rhinos should be protected given their endangered status.
An estimated 4,000 black rhinos remain in the wild, down from 70,000 in the 1960s. Nearly 1,800 are in Namibia, according to the Safari Club.
Critics have said any hunting of a rhino sends a bad message to the public. "This auction is telling the world that an American will pay anything to kill their species," Jeffrey Flocken, North American regional director of the Massachusetts-based IFAW, said. "This is, in fact, making a spectacle of killing an endangered species."
The auction took place in downtown Dallas under tight security. Organisers hoped to at least break the previous high bid for one of the permits in Namibia, which was $223,000, and had said the amount could be as high as $1m. The nation offers five permits each year, and the one auctioned on Saturday was the first to be made available for purchase outside Namibia.
The winning bidder could have come from anywhere in the world and at least some bidders were expected to enter by phone.
About 40 protesters gathered early Saturday evening outside the convention centre where the auction and a pre-auction dinner were to take place. They held signs and chanted.
"There's less than 5,000 black rhinos left on the planet," said Jim Ries, who travelled with his family from Atlanta to protest, "and if our kids ever want to see a rhino left in the wild we can't be pulling the trigger on every one we say is too old to breed."
Poachers long have targeted all species of rhino, primarily for its horn, which is valuable on the international black market. Made of the protein keratin, the chief component in fingernails and hooves, the horn has been used in carvings and for medicinal purposes, mostly in Asia. The near-extinction of the species also has been attributed to habitat loss.
СРСП 9
Тема: составление монологического высказывания
Методические указания:
Выразите в письменной форме свою точку зрения по отношению к прочитанной статье
Охарактеризуйте основную мысль автора
Опровергните основную мысль автора
Составьте план статьи
Напишите краткую аннотацию прочитанной статьи
Напишите изложение статьи
МАТЕРИАЛ ДЛЯ РАБОТЫ:
ТЕКСТ №9
Cancer: UK women have 10th highest rate for cases linked to lack of exercise
About 12,000 of cases of bowel, breast and womb cancers a year could be prevented if people were more physically active, scientists say
Women on exercise bikes. Just 36% of British women meet recommended guidelines of at least 30 minutes of moderate activity five days a week. Photograph: Altrendo Images/Getty Images
Women in the UK have the 10th highest rate in the world for cancers linked to a lack of physical activity, research has found.
The estimated number of diagnosed cases of bowel, breast and womb cancers in 2012 was 78,935, about 12,000 of which could be prevented if people were more physically active, according to scientists.
When the figures, published by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, were standardised by age so that different countries could be compared on an equal basis, the UK had 133.3 cases per 100,000 people.
"It is worrying," said Dr Rachel Thompson, head of research interpretation at World Cancer Research Fund. "Not only are they [bowel, breast and womb cancers] related to physical inactivity, they are all related to excess body fats. It does look like lifestyle plays an important part. If people lived healthier lifestyles, a number of cases of cancer could be prevented."
Just 36% of British women meet the government's recommended physical activity guidelines of at least 30 minutes of moderate activity five days a week. After not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight is the best thing to do to reduce cancer risk.
Scientists estimate that about 12% of bowel and breast cancer cases and about 10% of womb cancer cases in the UK could be prevented if people were more physically active – about 12,000 cases each year.
Barbados has the highest incidence per 100,000 people, with 154.9 cases of the three cancers, but the top 10 is dominated by western countries, with France (fifth) and the US (eighth) also on the list.
Thompson said there were issues with the quality of data from Barbados and the Bahamas, the only other non-western country appearing in the top 10. Thompson added that