Category: Extraordinary

Read time : 2 mins

Level : Intermediate

By MICHELLE L. PRICE Associated Press

President Donald Trump signed on Saturday an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States.

The order allows government agencies and organizations that receive federal funding to choose whether to continue to offer documents and services in language other than English.

It rescinds a mandate from former President Bill Clinton that required the government and organizations that received federal funding to provide language assistance to non-English speakers. Continue reading

Read time : 3 mins

Level : Advanced

By DORANY PINEDA Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — On a recent Sunday, Tracy Quinn drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to assess damage wrought upon the coastline by the Palisades Fire.

The water line was darkened by ash. Burnt remnants of washing machines and dryers and metal appliances were strewn about the shoreline. Sludge carpeted the water’s edge. Waves during high tide lapped onto charred homes, pulling debris and potentially toxic ash into the ocean as they receded.

“It was just heartbreaking,” said Quinn, president and CEO of the environmental group Heal the Bay, whose team has reported ash and debris some 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of the Palisades burn area west of Los Angeles. Continue reading

Read time : 3 mins

Level : Advanced

By SYLVIE CORBET and RAF CASERT Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — European leaders insisted Monday they must have a say in international talks to end the war in Ukraine despite the clear message from both Washington and Moscow that there was no role for them as yet in negotiations that could shape the future of the continent.

Three hours of emergency talks at the Elysee Palace in Paris left leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, NATO and the European Union without a common view on possible peacekeeping troops after a U.S. diplomatic blitz on Ukraine last week threw a once-solid trans-Atlantic alliance into turmoil. Continue reading

Read time : 5 mins

Level : Intermediate

By BEN FINLEY Associated Press

It’s one of the most important pieces of forensic evidence following a plane crash: The so-called “black box.”

There are actually two of these remarkably sturdy devices: the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. And they’re typically orange, not black.

Federal investigators on Friday recovered the black boxes from the passenger jet that crashed in the Potomac River just outside Washington on Wednesday, while authorities were still searching for similar devices in the military helicopter that also went down. Continue reading

Read time : 3 mins

Level : Advanced

By LORNE COOK Associated Press

POLOWCE, Poland (AP) — Poland’s six-month presidency of the European Union is firmly focused on security. As Europe’s biggest land war in decades rages, fewer places highlight the challenges and contradictions of defending the bloc and its values more starkly than the border with Belarus.

Some 13,000 border guards and soldiers protect around 400 kilometers (250 miles) of border. It’s become a buffer zone since Belarus’ ally, Russia, invaded neighboring Ukraine three years ago. Similar fortifications farther north line Poland’s frontier with the Russian region of Kaliningrad.

Poland is Ukraine’s top logistical backer. Most of the Western-supplied arms, ammunition and equipment helping to keep Ukraine’s armed forces afloat transit through. Russia, meanwhile, uses Belarus as a staging ground for its invasion. Continue reading

Read time : 3 mins

Level : Advanced

By DANIEL NIEMANN, MIKE CORDER and PAUL WISEMAN Associated Press

STOCKHOLM (AP) — The Nobel memorial prize in economics was awarded Monday to three economists who have studied why some countries are rich and others poor and have documented that freer, open societies are more likely to prosper.

The work by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson “demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity,” the Nobel committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said at the announcement in Stockholm.

Acemoglu and Johnson work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while Robinson does his research at the University of Chicago.

Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said their analysis has provided “a much deeper understanding of the root causes of why countries fail or succeed.” Continue reading

Read time : 3 mins

Level : Advanced

By EDITH M. LEDERER Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Facing a swirl of conflicts and crises across a fragmented world, leaders attending this week’s annual U.N. gathering are being challenged: Work together — not only on front-burner issues but on modernizing the international institutions born after World War II so they can tackle the threats and problems of the future.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued the challenge a year ago after sounding a global alarm about the survival of humanity and the planet: Come to a “Summit of the Future” and make a new commitment to multilateralism – the foundation of the United Nations and many other global bodies – and start fixing the aging global architecture to meet the rapidly changing world.

The U.N. chief told reporters last week that the summit “was born out of a cold, hard fact: international challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them.” He pointed to “out-of-control geopolitical divisions” and “runaway” conflicts, climate change, inequalities, debt and new technologies like artificial intelligence which have no guardrails. Continue reading

Read time : 3 mins

Level : Advanced

By MARI YAMAGUCHI Associated Press

TOKYO (AP) — A long robot entered a damaged reactor at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant on Tuesday, beginning a two-week, high-stakes mission to retrieve for the first time a tiny amount of melted fuel debris from the bottom.

The robot’s trip into the Unit 2 reactor is a crucial initial step for what comes next — a daunting, decades-long process to decommission the plant and deal with large amounts of highly radioactive melted fuel inside three reactors that were damaged by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Specialists hope the robot will help them learn more about the status of the cores and the fuel debris.

Here is an explanation of how the robot works, its mission, significance and what lies ahead as the most challenging phase of the reactor cleanup begins. Continue reading