WEEK 7 :Terror Through the Eyes of Innocents: The Children in Nice

NICE, France — It was the first and last fireworks show in this seaside city that 4½-year-old Yanis Coviaux ever saw. He died in the carnage Thursday night. So did Brodie Copeland, 11, who was visiting from the United States.

Haroun El Kamel, 12, survived but might never look at fireworks the same way.

Then there was Laura Borla, 14, who came to see the fireworks with her twin sister and their mother but was separated from them in the chaos. After days of searching frantically for her, Laura’s family learned on Sunday morning that she was dead.

“We miss you already; we will love you always,” her 19-year-old sister, Lucie, said in a Facebook post.

The driver who plowed his truck into crowds at the conclusion of the Bastille Day fireworks in Nice killed at least 84 people and injured hundreds more. The trauma was exacerbated by the presence of a large number of children, whose deaths, injuries and psychological scars gave this attack — like the one in March that killed many children at a park in Pakistan, or the recent slaughter of families celebrating the end of Ramadan in Baghdad — an especially brutal feel and underscored its indiscriminate cruelty.

At least 10 children were killed Thursday night, and at least 35 were treated for injuries at hospitals in Nice. Others were separated from their parents in the chaos, and some no doubt saw and heard things they might carry with them for a long time.

No one who was visiting the waterfront that night could have imagined such a horrific ending. Going to the fireworks on July 14 is an annual family ritual in Nice, a time for picnics on the beach — and, when the beach is too full, for spreading tablecloths on the meridian of the waterfront road known for more than 150 years as the Promenade des Anglais. From there, people have a fine view of the sea and the extravagant fireworks display.

“You have to bring your children because if you don’t, you will pay for it all year — all their friends are there,” said Raja El Kamel, 43, Haroun’s mother, who was with him and a close friend from Sweden and her two children to watch the festivities.

In a city that enjoys a party, the July 14 fireworks are especially beloved because the entire community joins in: Christian and Muslim, religious and secular, but French above all. The presence of large numbers of tourists gives the evening even more of a festive feel.

For 4½-year-old Yanis and his parents, Mickael and Samira Coviaux, the evening was a first. The parents, both truck drivers, live in Grenoble, and this was their first time seeing the July 14 fireworks on the Mediterranean as a family, said Yanis’s aunt Anaïs Coviaux, a law student in Paris, who came to support her brother and sister-in-law after Yanis was killed.

“The children were playing among themselves, and they had their back to the road,” she said. “They did not hear the truck until just one second before it hit. It went up on the sidewalk; it struck Yanis and the mother of one of the other children with them.” The mother also died.

There was no first aid nearby. Finally, Mr. Coviaux picked up his little boy and began walking with him until they found a person with a car who agreed to take them to the hospital. When they passed some firefighters, they stopped and asked them to try to revive him. But the child was dead.

“He was my parents’ only grandson, the only grandson in the family,” Anaïs Coviaux said softly. She explained that her brother and his wife were too distraught to speak. “Yanis loved people,” she said. “He especially liked Sundays when all the family was gathered, and he would say, ‘Mamie and Papi, we are going to have a party.’”

Later, Mr. Coviaux said in an email that “every single person that Yanis met in his short life fell in love with him.”

The entire family gathered on the promenade Saturday to view the last sights he had seen.

“It was important for us to come to the place he died to pay him a tribute,” Anaïs Coviaux said, “because we could not bear to say goodbye to him. We left a picture of him and flowers.”

Identifying children and examining them has been difficult because of the level of trauma and because some were brought to the hospital without relatives, said Sylvie Serret, a child psychiatrist at the Lenval Foundation hospital, which treated at least 30 injured children on Thursday night.

“A lot of the children coming in were in a state of shock; they were not speaking, for instance,” she said.

An emergency room nurse at Pasteur Hospital, Mejdi Chemakhi, cared for several children, including a boy and a girl who had been brought in without their parents. The boy was 4, Mr. Chemakhi said, and the girl was 6.

The boy, Mr. Chemakhi recounted, spoke in a flat tone, apparently in shock.

“My mummy is dead, but my daddy is still alive,” he recalled the boy saying over and over. The boy, expressionless, finally said, “I am tired, I need to sleep, I have no clothes,” Mr. Chemakhi recalled.

“So I took him in my arms and tried to console him,” he said. “You don’t really know what else to do in those situations. It is really important to make them feel safe.”

Later that night, a wounded man was brought to the hospital and told Mr. Chemakhi that he had lost his wife and could not find his children, a boy and a girl. Mr. Chemakhi realized the three belonged together and helped reunite them.

On the Promenade des Anglais on Saturday, there were memorials of flowers and notes, sometimes every few feet, to mark where people had lost their lives. Nathalie Russo, 30, a Muslim who wears a hijab, came with her mother to retrace the steps she and her children, 5-year-old Mayssa and 2-year-old Emine, took on Thursday night.

“My daughter is telling me that she does not want to see fireworks again,” Ms. Russo said, adding, “She kept asking me, ‘How did the bad people get from Paris to Nice?’”

“She thought the man who did this was one of those who attacked the Bataclan,” she said, “and he had come here to do the same thing.”

The Bataclan is the Paris concert hall where 90 people were shot dead by three Islamic State operatives on Nov. 13, when a total of 130 people were killed in and around Paris by terrorists.

Some mothers and fathers who had not been near the fireworks brought their children to see the memorials on Saturday as a way of expressing unity with the community and defiance toward the terrorists.

Nour Hamila, a Nice native who has converted to Islam, made a point of bringing her three children, who are 8, 5 and 3. “I told them not to be afraid because that’s what the terrorists want; we have to support each other,” she said as her 5-year-old son, Mohamed, placed flowers on one of the memorials.

It is harder for those children who witnessed the killings.

For Ms. Kamel’s 12-year-old son, Haroun, the moment is etched in his mind.

“We saw it from far away, a white truck in this black night,” she said. She recalled thinking that the truck did not belong there because the street was closed to traffic.

Her son and her friend’s 12-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter were playing and laughing. Then the driver accelerated and began to veer from one side of the road to the other, “plowing into people,” she said.

Somehow she pushed herself and her son onto the sidewalk as the truck neared. Then it passed, and all she remembers was her son saying, “Mama, Mama, you must come to help the people.”

She looked at the road and recognized a neighbor who was kneeling next to her husband, wailing his name. Ms. Kamel told her son to go with her friend and the other children.

Everything was silent. “There was just this terrible wind,” she said.

“To the left you saw bodies; you looked right and saw bodies; there were strollers, and people trying to save other people.”

After trying to comfort her neighbor, she looked for her son, but by then the crowds were running, and it was chaos. Hours later, when she found him and her friend, her son said, “Mama, did you manage to save the man?”

Ms. Kamel responded that the emergency services had come for him.

“You know, children don’t have a global vision,” she said. “He saw all those corpses, but for him, the one at his feet was supposed to be saved.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/world/europe/terror-through-the-eyes-of-innocents-the-children-in-nice.html

Structure of the Lead:

WHO-The children in Nice

WHAT-A relative paid tribute on Saturday to 4-year-old Yanis Coviaux, who was killed in the truck attack along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France.

WHERE-Paris

WHEN-2016-July

WHY-not given

HOW-The driver who plowed his truck into crowds at the conclusion of the Bastille Day fireworks in Nice killed at least 84 people and injured hundreds more

keywords:

1. trauma 外傷
2. exacerbated 惡化
3. underscored 強調
4.  brutal 殘酷
5. indiscriminate 不分青紅皂白
6. extravagant 奢華
7. distraught 心煩意亂
8. terrorists 恐怖份子
9. witnessed 見證
10. defiance  蔑視

Week 6:Shanghai Disneyland Opens Amid Rain and Pageantry

SHANGHAI — “Mickey Maose” has officially arrived.

In a rain-dampened ceremony attended by Chinese dignitaries, the Walt Disney Company on Thursday opened its $5.5 billion Shanghai Disney Resort, a theme park and hotel complex that represents a hard-fought victory in China for the singularly American entertainment conglomerate. “Our dream comes true,” a beaming Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said in Mandarin at the ceremony’s start.

The park — Disney’s first on the Chinese mainland — was held up as nothing less than a historic symbol of United States-China relations. Mr. Iger read aloud a letter sent by President Obama that heralded the resort as capturing “the promise of our bilateral relationship.” In a letter of his own, China’s president, Xi Jinping, called the project, which took nearly two years of bruising negotiations to realize, a sign of China’s “commitment to cross-cultural cooperation and our innovation mentality in the new era.”

On a lighter note, Wang Yang, one of China’s vice premiers, stood onstage in front of the park’s lavish storybook castle and joked that the rain was a sign of good luck — the “rain of U.S. dollars and RMB,” he said, referring to China’s currency, the renminbi. Disney owns 43 percent of the resort, with the majority stake held by a Chinese state-controlled consortium.

With that, fireworks exploded, fountains danced and jubilant performers dressed as Disney princesses took to the stage as more than 30 dancers and flag twirlers frolicked.

It was a discordant scene with happenings elsewhere in the Disney empire. Mr. Iger was awakened at 4 a.m. on Thursday with the news that the authorities in Florida had found the body of a toddler, Lane Graves, who had been dragged by an alligator into a hotel lake at Walt Disney World on Wednesday. Mr. Iger phoned the child’s parents and said in a statement that “as a parent and a grandparent, my heart goes out to the Graves family during this time of devastating loss.”

Mr. Iger and his public affairs teams, working nearly round the clock from Shanghai in recent days, also had to contend with the mass shooting on Sunday in Orlando, Fla., which is in many ways a Disney company town. Disney employees were among the shooting victims; it was subsequently reported that the gunman, Omar Mateen, had earlier made a surveillance trip to a Disney World shopping complex.

In Shanghai, more than a year of meticulous planning resulted in an opening that was surprisingly smooth. So far, the park here has suffered none of the cultural missteps that marred Disney openings in France and Hong Kong over the decades.

“I brought my daughter here because she loves Mickey,” said Zhang Yan, 28, who came on opening day with her daughter, Li Xinyi, 7, who was wearing pink princess regalia. Ms. Zhang said she had driven three hours from Yangzhou.

Mr. Iger’s goal for Shanghai Disneyland was nothing short of immediate perfection, but no amount of experience, planning and focus-group research could prepare Disney for what would happen when Chinese patrons began to pour through the gates. Would they buy mouse ear headbands? How long would they stay? Would they understand that waiting in line was part of the experience?

“On a lot of things, we had no idea,” Mr. Iger said, striding through the park on Saturday, an extremely sticky day on which roughly 35,000 people turned out as part of a soft opening.

So far, the answers have been mostly positive. “Turkey legs, corn dogs, hamburgers, popcorn — what you might call American food — is blowing the doors off,” Mr. Iger said. “We didn’t expect that.”

Mouse ears are one of the biggest sellers in stores. “I’ve even seen men wearing them,” Mr. Iger said.

The monumental task of opening the park, which included planting 2.4 million shrubs, stocking 7,000 pieces of merchandise and training 10,000 employees, has had its challenges. In recent days, engineers were racing to finish an elaborate white-water raft ride. And Soaring Over the Horizon, a flight simulator that whisks riders to world monuments like the Eiffel Tower, was having some technical difficulties, resulting in four-hour lines at one point.

On the other hand, the Explorer Canoes, called Davy Crockett’s Explorer Canoes in the United States, have been lost in translation for some.

“When people first got into the canoes they didn’t realize they had to paddle,” Mr. Iger said. “So we had the two cast members” — Disney’s term for park employees — “paddling, like, 30 people.”

Although Disney holds only a minority position in the park, the profit potential for the company remains nothing short of spectacular, analysts say. It will receive a 43 percent share of revenue from the park, which includes merchandise, food sales and hotel income. Single-day adult ticket prices cost $75 on weekends and holidays, a healthy price in China, and $56 for nonpeak days. (That compares with $125 and $105 at Disney World.)

Disney will also receive a fee for its role in managing the resort and royalties for the use of its characters. Moreover, Disney expects Shanghai Disneyland to increase interest across China for its movies, toys, clothes, video games and books.

Even a little growth in China would have a big financial impact on Disney. The entertainment conglomerate generated $52.5 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year, and Asia represented about 7.5 percent of that total. Disney does not release more detailed information, but Anthony DiClemente, an analyst at Nomura Securities, estimates that Disney had $1 billion in revenue in China in 2015; excluding Hong Kong, the total is closer to $700 million — a drop in the Disney bucket.

With so much at stake, Mr. Iger deeply involved himself in the preparations. He tasted the food in advance, including Mickey Mouse-shaped Peking duck pizza and what he called “distinctly Chinese” turkey legs with hoisin sauce. He gave feedback on ride-operator costumes and personally chose the spot where a statue of Walt Disney would be placed. “I said, ‘No, no, no – I want it closer to the castle,’” he recalled.

On his tour, Mr. Iger walked through a 15-acre garden in the center of the park designed for older visitors. In part because of China’s longtime one-child policy, Shanghai Disneyland must have strong intergenerational appeal. As “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” from “Mary Poppins” played on the Fantasia Carousel sound system, Mr. Iger pointed toward a grove of cherry trees where 12 mosaics depicted Disney characters in Chinese zodiac style.

“We think this will be a very popular photo op,” he said. Disney learned at Hong Kong Disneyland, which opened in 2005, that the Chinese love to take pictures of themselves in front of whimsical facades. (Mr. Iger’s zodiac symbol — he was born in 1951 — is a rabbit, represented on the wall by Thumper from “Bambi.”)

Next, it was on to the castle, the largest, and the tallest (197 feet), that Disney has ever built. Upstairs is an ornate princess-themed restaurant with leaded-glass windows, intricately painted ceilings and chandeliers that look as if they belong at Versailles.

Mr. Iger cited the opulence as an example of what he calls “the Disney difference,” which means a presentation so time-consuming and expensive that most rivals can’t come close to mimicking it.

Suddenly, however, Mr. Iger’s ebullience faded. Upon exiting the castle, he had spotted a dozen people crouched in the building’s vestibule.

“This is because we still don’t have enough benches or shade yet,” he said. “Believe me, that’s getting fixed.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/business/international/disney-shanghai-opens.html?action=click&contentCollection=Times%20Insider&module=RelatedCoverage&region=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article

Structure of the Lead:

WHO-not given

WHAT-Early visitors of the Shanghai Disney Resort expressed their excitement about the $5.5 billion theme park that opened its doors on Thursday

WHERE-Shanghai

WHEN-2016-June

WHY-not given

HOW-not given

keywords:

1.  commitment 承諾
2.  discordant 不一致
3. devastating 毀滅性
4. meticulous 細緻
5. monuments 紀念碑
6. merchandise 商品
7.  intricately 錯綜複雜
8. mimicking 模仿
9. conglomerate 集團
10. roughly 大致

NASA Delays Next Mars Rover Mission

NASA has pushed back the launching of its next ambitious Mars mission by two years because of lengthening delays and lingering technical issues, agency officials announced Thursday.

The Mars Science Laboratory, a S.U.V.-size rover that is to explore the Martian surface for two years, is now set to be launched in 2011. It had been scheduled to lift off in September or October next year and arrive at Mars in 2010. With unsolved issues with some of the spacecraft’s electrical motors, however, NASA officials no longer thought they could meet that schedule without rushing the testing program.

“We’ve determined that trying for ‘09 would require us to assume too much risk, more than I think is appropriate for a flagship mission like Mars Science Laboratory,” Michael D. Griffin, NASA’s administrator, said at a news conference Thursday.

Because the Earth and Mars come close to each other only once every 26 months, the next chance for launching is not until fall 2011.

The delay comes at considerable cost. Originally approved at a cost of $1.63 billion in August 2006, the Mars Science Laboratory’s budget has already swelled to $1.88 billion, and NASA officials said in October that they anticipated the mission needed another $200 million next year to meet the 2009 launch date.

With the delay, there is no need to spend the $200 million in 2009 to speed up the work. But the delay, with additional testing, will add $400 million, spread over several years, to the mission’s cost, bringing the total to about $2.3 billion.

“We think we can get by without canceling anything,” Dr. Griffin said, although some missions will almost certainly be delayed. The cuts will first come out of the Mars research program, but other planetary missions may also be affected.

“We’re going to find the least damaging way we can,” Dr. Griffin said.

Dr. Griffin said he did not consider cancelling Mars Science Laboratory. “I would have to believe the project was going badly, in a technical sense,” he said. “It’s not. It’s going great.”

The team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which is building the spacecraft, did not do a good job of estimating costs, Dr. Griffin said, but in terms of the technical work, “Even in retrospect, they have not done anything wrong.”

Dr. Griffin noted some of NASA’s most famous successes also suffered cost overruns. “If we canceled everything on those grounds, we’d have never have finished Hubble,” he said, referring to the Hubble Space Telescope.

“I worked on Hubble,” he said. “I always say I am proud to say that I worked on Hubble, and I am. But we didn’t come within a factor of two. And does anybody today out there in the science community or those who watch the science community regret building Hubble?”

Edward J. Weiler, the associate administrator for space sciences, said he has had some preliminary discussions with the European Space Agency about cooperating on future Mars missions, especially one that would bring some Martian rocks back to Earth. “We will never ever do a sample return mission unless we work together,” he said. “This makes eminent sense to both of us.”

A sample return mission likely would not occur until the early 2020s and would cost $6 billion to $8 billion.

KEYWORD:

1. lengthening 延長
2. Laboratory 實驗室
3.  flagship 旗艦
4. anticipated 預期
5. spacecraft 航天器
6. Propulsion 驅動
7. preliminary 初步
8. eminent 傑出
9.  Martian rocks 火星岩
10.  administrator 管理員

Structure of the Lead：

     WHO-NASA

     WHEN-2008/4

     WHAT-NASA Delays Next Mars Rover Mission

     WHY-Because the Earth and Mars come close to each other only once every 26 months, the next chance for launching is not until fall 2011.

     WHERE-The Mars Science Laboratory

     HOW-not given

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/science/space/05mars.html

Paris attacks: A year of grief, anger and change

Lanterns, candles and calls for peace illuminated the City of Light on Sunday as Paris mourned 130 people killed one year ago in attacks throughout the city.

November 13, 2015, was like any other day for Georges Salines: Work, a lunchtime swim with his daughter Lola, watching the news on TV, and an early night. He had no idea, until the phone rang, jolting him from his sleep, that his world was about to change forever.

"I went to bed ... without knowing what was going on in the streets of Paris," he recalls. "I was woken up by a phone call in the middle of the night, from my eldest son, who knew that his sister was at the Bataclan."

Salines' 29-year-old daughter, Lola, had gone to a concert at the Bataclan by US rock band the Eagles of Death Metal. Midway through the show, ISIS-linked gunmen opened fire on the audience and detonated suicide vests; 90 people were killed in the raid, one of a series of coordinated attacks across Paris.

Unable to reach her, the family spent hours trying to find out what had happened to Lola, calling emergency help lines and hospitals, even the morgue, but nobody could tell them if she was alive. Then the worst news, delivered in the worst way: They discovered via social media that she had been killed.

"I hope she didn't suffer or see her death coming," her father says.

'We shall not forget them'

French President Francois Hollande unveiled plaques at attack sites in the city -- at the Stade de France, outside the Petit Cambodge restaurant, in the Boulevard Voltaire, and at the Bonne Biere and Belle Equipe cafes.

At the Bataclan, the President tore down a French flag to reveal the memorial, as the names of all 90 who perished there were read aloud in solemn ceremony.

It followed an emotional performance on Saturday night by musician Sting, a fundraiser for victim support charities at the newly opened Bataclan. He began with the words: "We shall not forget them."

The much-loved venue has been renovated to remove all traces of the massacre that took place there.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said a state of emergency, first imposed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, will likely be extended.

With the country's presidential elections coming in April-May, the prime minister said the government needs to retain the extra powers delegated by emergency laws "to protect our democracy."

'Bloody battlefield'

Denys Plaud was also at the Bataclan on the night of the attacks. He credits his survival to the fact that, when the attackers burst in, he was up on the balcony where there was more room to move to the music.

"I love to dance, and that saved my life," he told CNN days after his escape from the Bataclan. "It meant I was not in the direct line of fire from the terrorists' machine guns."

Plaud hid in a tiny room at the venue with 15 others; they waited as the gunmen got closer and closer, even shooting at the partition that sheltered them: "I thought, 'Oh my God, I hope that wall will stand.'"

"For three hours, we had to listen to the shooting," he remembers. "That was terrible. Every time we thought it would end, it was just time for the terrorists to get their weapons reloaded, and then they would shoot again."

Eventually, the police arrived and led them to safety across what Plaud calls "the bloody battlefield," urging them not to look at the bodies of their fellow music fans. "But ... it was not a direct path, I had to look where I was putting my feet. ... There was no way but to look at death."

A year on, he says, the memories are "very fresh ... it's just like it was yesterday."

Artist turns Paris attacks ordeal into graphic novel

A nation traumatized

By late morning Sunday, the first flowers to remember victims were placed among the autumn leaves at the Place de la République, which became the center of the city's mourning and expressions of national unity after the attacks.

For many Parisians, it is an opportunity to begin getting on with life.

The year since the attacks has been filled with shock, grief and mourning -- for the relatives of the dead, for those who survived, and for France as a whole: The nation was left traumatized.

Extra police and troops have been on the streets of France since January 2015, when terrorists attacked the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people: Armed officers now patrol outside tourist hot spots, schools, government and religious buildings.

Operation Sentinel has seen the mobilization of 10,000 soldiers to monitor and protect more than 11,000 locations across the country -- 3,000 of them religious sites, the rest a mixture of key infrastructure, industrial plants and "symbolic" places around the country.

And despite all the extra security on the streets, what happened in January and November 2015 -- and other incidents that followed in 2016, in Nice, Rouen and Magnanville -- have impacted the country's morale. Plaud says Paris itself was left "in shock."

Anger at these events has been linked to a steep rise in xenophobia; according to the National Commission on Human Rights, or CCNDH, there were 429 reports of attacks on, and threats against, Muslims in France in 2015 -- a rise of 223% on the previous year.

This "wave of aggression against Muslims" ranged from assaults on women wearing the hijab to graffiti on places of worship and halal butcher shops. In one incident, the door handle of a mosque was wrapped in bacon. The CCNDH says the majority happened in January and November.

The attacks have also damaged France's prized tourism industry: Almost 2 million fewer visitors have come to the country over the past year -- international arrivals are down 8.1% so far in 2016.

But Plaud says the country has seen troubled times before, and is sure to bounce back: "I am confident; in Parisian history there have been a lot of events like that -- war, civil war. But Paris has always been able to recover."

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/13/europe/paris-attacks-one-year-on/index.html

Structure of the Lead:

WHO-not given

WHAT-One year on, events mark the anniversary and remember victims and survivors

WHERE-Paris

WHEN-One year ago

WHY-ISIS-linked terrorists attacked sites across Paris on November 13, 2015, killing 130 people

HOW-not given

keywords:

1.  illuminated 照亮
2. mourned 哀悼
3.  detonated 引爆
4. suicide 自殺
5. coordinated 協調
6. unveiled 揭開
7. solemn 莊嚴
8. traumatized 創傷
9. satirical 諷刺
10. democracy 民主

Four years of hell: Aid groups say world is failing Syria's civilians

Four years. At least 220,000 people killed -- more than one every 10 minutes. Millions displaced.

The Syrian civil war is a human calamity and it's getting worse, according to a furious new report from more than 20 aid groups.

U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at protecting civilians caught up in the conflict have failed miserably, the humanitarian organizations say in the report released Thursday.

"This spiraling catastrophe is a stain on the conscience of the international community," says the report, whose signatories include Oxfam and Save the Children.

"We're worried that, as we approach the fourth anniversary, this could turn into a situation of acceptance -- 'Oh, that's just the way it is over there' -- and that mustn't be," Nigel Timmins, deputy director for Oxfam Great Britain, told CNN.

'Ever-increasing destruction'

It highlights the paltry results of a Security Council resolution passed in February 2014 that called for an increase in humanitarian aid, a halt to attacks on civilians, an end to kidnapping and torture and the lifting of sieges of populated areas.

"In the 12 months since Resolution 2139 was passed, civilians in Syria have witnessed ever-increasing destruction, suffering and death," the report says.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based monitoring group, has reported that 2014 was the deadliest year so far in the grinding conflict that began in March 2011 as an uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and splintered into a chaotic civil war.

More than 76,000 people were killed in the violence in Syria last year, nearly 18,000 of them civilians, according to the observatory.

The conflict has brought allegations of atrocities carried out by al-Assad's forces and enabled ISIS' savage rule over parts of the country. Attempts at peace talks involving the government and opposition have so far gone nowhere.

As the war threatens to sow further chaos in the region, the United States and its allies are bombing ISIS targets in Syria and working to arm and train rebel groups.

Catalog of misery

The aid groups' report, entitled "Failing Syria," reeled off a list of worsening problems reported by international agencies:

• The number of people in need of humanitarian aid in Syria increased by nearly a third during 2014, rising to 12.2 million from 9.3 million at the end of 2013.

• That includes a jump of more than a million children in need, up from 4.3 million in December 2013 to 5.6 million in December 2014.

• A leap in the number of refugees during 2014, from 2.4 million to 3.8 million -- and a 1.1 million rise, to 7.6 million, in internally displaced people.

• Aid convoys are finding it harder to get to the people who need their help, reaching 63% fewer beneficiaries in 2014 than in 2013.

• Financial support is weakening: Syria crisis appeals were only 57% funded in 2014, compared with 71% in 2013.

The report called on Security Council members to "use their influence with the warring parties and their financial resources to put an end to the suffering of Syrian civilians."

In Washington, a group of Syrian Americans and other supporters gathered near the White House on Wednesday to mark the four years of bloodshed and read the names of 100,000 people who were killed in the violence.

Crisis at refugee camp

A U.N. aid official told CNN of the crisis unfolding at one particular refugee camp in Syria that he had just visited.

"What I saw yesterday really shattered and devastated me," said Pierre Krahenbuhl, the head of of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees who has been working in conflict zones for 20 years.

Around 18,000 Palestinian refugees in the Yarmouk camp are in "dire" need of food and health aid, he said Wednesday, describing seeing enfeebled men and a fainting pregnant woman waiting for assistance.

The ongoing conflict is adding to the plight of the camp's inhabitants.

"You have inside the camp a number of armed groups and of course you then have government armed forces around it," Krahenbuhl said. "There is this link between the presence of armed groups inside and the suffering taking place."

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/12/middleeast/syria-conflict-humanitarian-crisis/index.html

Structure of the Lead:

WHO-Syrian

WHEN-March 12, 2015 

WHERE-Syria

WHY-Syrian civil war

WHAT-At least 220,000 people are estimated to have been killed in four years of war

HOW-not given

keywords:

1. furious 狂怒
2. displaced 移位
3. catastrophe 災難
4.  humanitarian 人道主義
5.  chaotic 混亂的
6. allegations 指控
7. beneficiaries 受益人
8. agencies 機構
9. shattered  破碎
10. Aid convoys 協助車隊