2021考研阅读--欧美热点事件素材

英国

1物资短缺（生词最少）

https://www.snapacc.com/blog/0086-The-UK-truck-driver-shortage-in-2021

Gas Stations In Britain Are Running Dry Due To The Post-Brexit Truck Driver Shortage : NPR

Brexit didn’t create the UK gas crisis. But it made it worse. - Vox

The situation is amplified by the United Kingdoms Brexit divorce from the European Union and its single market, which cut off its once ready supply of low-skilled workers from Europe.

Truck drivers, meat packers, construction workers and farm hands are among those jobs left begging, which has led to gas stations running out of fuel and empty grocery store shelves. And a rather not-so-merry Christmas looms, with predictions that there will be a scarcity of turkeys, Christmas trees, high-tech games and champagne.

目前最明显的是 fuel crisis 各加油站都售罄。当然日需品necessities也是如此，十分缺乏。其中公众囤积购物 panic shopping，加剧了目前的短缺 scarcity。

Brexit之后，一些特殊技能人才 skilled workers离开英国，其中包括重型卡车司机（HGV drivers），所以很多物资囤积在港口harbor，无法运到城市中心downtown或者人口密集的区域 highly-populated areas。汽油也囤积在精炼厂refineries，无法运送，所以失去缺乏物资供给short of goods，目前计划让军队运送物资。

建议

HGV driving is a male-dominated industry, and the lack of diversity has added to the shortage of truck drivers. According to the FTA, only 1.2% of all UK drivers are female. Breaking the stereotype and getting more female truckers on the roads is essential to solving the HGV driver shortage.

If regulations were relaxed and grants were more accessible, it would help a number of younger truckers join the industry.

The lack of training and testing could be solved by adopting a different strategy. ITV reported that bus companies can test drivers themselves, but this option is not available for HGV training schools. Adopting this strategy would allow much more drivers to gain the necessary skills and accreditations.

1改变对一些职业，尤其是HGV drivers的负面印象stereotype。

2 让职业人群多样化diversified，包括让更过女性和年轻人加入到职业队伍中。

3政府的支持 support from government。包括加工资 salary rise，还要提供一些福利和和保险 pension health insurance之类的。

4 加强对一些职业的培训和完善考试考核机制。Job training

补充：当然这个情况美国也有，只是英国更加明显。

美国

2失业人口

数据最低纪录

More than a third of jobless Americans are still long-term unemployed (cnbc.com)

United States Unemployment Rate | 2021 Data | 2022 Forecast | 1948-2020 Historical (tradingeconomics.com)

The unemployment rate reached 14.8% in April 2020 after federal and local governments shut down the economy. This was the highest since the Great Depression. October 2021s unemployment rate dropped slightly 4.6%, but its still higher than pre-pandemic levels.

原因

The No. 1 reason unemployed Americans arent looking for work - MarketWatch

The Effects of a High Unemployment Rate | Sapling

担心新冠 concern about COVID-19

经济无忧 financial security

Among the unemployed, concern about COVID-19 is the most commonly cited reason for a lack of urgency in looking for work. Unemployed workers said they’ll be more interested in getting back to work after they see certain milestones happen, such as more job opportunities, more vaccinations, and school starting up in the fall.

After COVID-19 fears, unemployed people said financial security was the biggest reason behind their lack of urgency in looking for a job. Some 20.8% listed an employed spouse as the reason for a lack of urgency while 9.5% said unemployment insurance was why they were not accelerating their job search.

低收入者

Unemployment insurance would benefit workers in low-wage occupations. Research from Bank of America supports the argument that too much unemployment aid keeps people from looking for work--but only if the workers in question previously made less than $32,000 per year, which is less than half the national median income.

被迫在家

For workers with care obligations, be it for children or older relatives, leaving the house for hours might just not be an option as long as the care infrastructure isnt fully up and running again. Last September, when schools started again, hundreds of thousands of women dropped out of the labor force due to child care obligations, for example. Benefits werent the reason.

因素早在新冠之前就存在

The real problem is that the pandemic has exacerbated trends that already hurt local economies before Covid. Youre shopping mostly online at Amazon (AMZN), Walmart (WMT) and the like. Local stores have no way to keep up with the convenience and prices of the big companies.

结论 别慌稳住

The pandemic economy is new and keeps evolving. Thats part of the reason economists got their forecasts so spectacularly wrong last month. At this point, its not even clear how much it really matters. The latest data disappointment might mean nothing in the long-run.

3德州心跳堕胎法

Texass 6-week abortion ban is now law. Getting an abortion that early is almost impossible. (http://msn.com)

DOJ Asks Supreme Court to Pause Texas Abortion Ban | National News | US News

Controversial Texas abortion law goes back into effect : NPR

Supreme Court refuses to block Texas six-week abortion ban - JURIST - News - Legal News & Commentary

争议

Because most people dont realize they are pregnant until after six weeks, the majority of people seeking abortions in Texas were unable to get the procedure. Texas law makes no exception for victims of rape or incest. The only exception to the ban was to save the life of the pregnant person in a medical crisis.

司法部反对

In Mondays filing, the government argues that the Texas abortion law is clearly unconstitutional in denying citizens access to a judicial remedy, and is therefore unlikely to stand. Texass sovereign immunity poses no barrier to this suit, Texas is unlikely to succeed on the merits.

难点 不知该起诉谁

However, the Court clarified that this order is not one on the merits.

The mechanism complicates the efforts of abortion providers to seek judicial review and to stop the law from taking effect because it hasnt been entirely clear who they should sue, given that the state isnt enforcing the law.

The Supreme Court concluded that the plaintiffs failed to meet their burden to prevail in an injunction and stated that “it is unclear whether the named defendants in this lawsuit can or will seek to enforce the Texas law against the applicants in a manner that might permit our intervention.”

补充

最高法院不阻止不是法理上merit的问题，而是程序procedural上的问题。最高法院具有的司法权包括

1审判权 根据法律作出判决。如《刑法》规定杀人者死，法院据此有权对罪犯判刑。

2司法审查权 judicial review.法院有权裁决法律是否符合宪法和之前的法律。最高法院宣布某法律违宪，便是基于司法审查权。但是最高法院或者任何联邦法院不能废除违宪的法律，废除或更改法律属于国会立法权。即便最高法院宣布某法律违宪，在国会对其做出调整之前，它仍然是美国法律的一部分。

最高法院宣布某法律违宪：

1法院停止执行该法律，即法院不以该法律作为审判依据。

2要求政府执法机构停止执行该法律。

州法律侵犯个人宪法权利，个人不能起诉州政府sovereign immunity,但是可以起诉该州执法机构和相应官员，要求其不得执行该法律。

德州heartbeat act禁止任何州执法机构介入，因此反对堕胎者找不到起诉对象。

4 澳大利亚要求科技巨头付费

Australia is demanding tech giants pay for news. Google relented, Facebook didn’t (http://msn.com)

Tech giants expand Australian misinformation measures week after government criticism | ZDNet

Google is making its biggest investment ever in Australia with the Digital Future Initiative – CNN

BBC News: Facebook Australia: Tech giant faces growing criticism over news ban - OSINT (http://opensourceintelligence.biz)

Australian Tech Giant Says Countrys Anti-Encryption Laws Are Harming Local Tech Companies | Techdirt

Australia to Put Tech Giants on Tighter Leash, Make Them Pay for News – Variety

Australias new law reveals anonymous online trolls and forces tech giants to pay - Sydney News Today

Facebook refuses to pay newspapers - The Times Group Malawi

Facebook refuses to pay revenue to Australian media - Asia Times | Canada News Media

事件 说好一起刚 谷歌先变卦

Facebook on Wednesday blocked people in Australia from posting news stories on its website, a drastic escalation in the battle over whether tech giants should pay publishers when their stories show up in search results or on social media.

Google took the opposite approach. The company struck deals in recent days with Australia’s major publishing companies, including on Wednesday with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, to pay for some of their news content.

未雨绸缪 投资自己做新闻

Google is making its largest-ever investment in Australia, after a clash with the government that saw the tech giant threaten to shut down search there earlier this year.

争执 支持方：科技巨头垄断 别人夹缝求生 新闻网站也提供了服务

The initiative has been strongly pushed by Australia’s two biggest media companies, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Nine Entertainment.

They argue that the crisis in the news industry worldwide is mainly because of Google, Facebook and other large tech firms capturing the vast majority of online advertising revenues, without fairly compensating media companies for advertisements placed in news content.

If you asked the newspaper owners, they would tell these newspaper articles either validate fake news or discredit social media news.

争执 反对方：新闻网站蹭了FB好处 FB从未要求新闻网站提供服务 我没赚很多

The legislation “seeks to penalize Facebook for content it didn’t take or ask for,” says William Easton, Facebook’s Managing Director in Australia & New Zealand. Unlike Google, which scrapes news sites and puts links to stories in search results, publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook to win traffic, Easton said.

Facebook and Google do not pay the newspapers for the stories. Both Facebook and Google claim that it is actually the newspapers that benefit. The philosophy is that if you pick a snippet of a story from Facebook or Google’s Instagram, you will be encourage to buy the newspaper.

The US tech giant said that news represents a “very small fraction” of the content in an average user’s news feed. Australia’s competition regulator, the ACCC, has estimated that Google and Facebook together earn some A$6 billion (US$4 billion) a year from advertising in the country. Leading news publishers have demanded the two companies pay at least 10% of that money each year to local news organizations. Google last month rejected the demand, saying it made barely A$10 million a year from news-linked advertising.

评价 做良心新闻不容易 还是要给点

If you noticed, main media newspaper houses do not rush to publish stories; no matter how newsworthy the pieces are. These credible news outlets gather evidence, balance the story. This is different from the stories that are published on social media platforms where everybody is an instant investigative journalist. The downside is that social media news is not reliable hence the moniker ‘fake news’.

Credible news is not cheap to create. Fake news cost nothing but sometimes cause injury to individuals. Newspaper companies must be compensated for what they spend to create news that validates fake news. It is a service and it cannot be free lunch. For main media outlets, this is actually a blessing in disguise, otherwise, if fake news was credible, who would need anything else?

5. 多植树不是应对气候变化的“万能药”

Why planting tons of trees isnt enough to solve climate change | Science News

Examining the Viability of Planting Trees to Help Mitigate Climate Change--Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet (nasa.gov)

Why dont we just plant a lot of trees? | MIT Climate Portal

Planting trees helps fight climate change--but we need billions more seedlings (nationalgeographic.com)

Planting trees is no panacea for climate change, says ecologist (ucsc.edu)

Planting trees "doesnt make any sense" in the fight against climate change (dezeen.com)

Planting trees will not cancel out climate change (scidev.net)

草地更好

A study from the University of California, Davis, discovered grasslands and rangelands are better and more resilient carbon sinkers than forest trees in California. This happens because grasslands "are less impacted by droughts and wildfires" as they "sequester most of their carbon underground, while forest trees stored it mostly in woody biomass and leaves."

As a result, when they burn, trees release carbon back to the atmosphere, while the carbon fixed by grasslands (which also absorb a lot of carbon) tends to stay in the roots and soils. This suggests grasslands are less vulnerable to (the increasingly likely to happen) weather events, droughts and fires and, therefore, more adaptive to climate change than trees. This means conserving grasslands that contributes to carbon absorption is very important to meet the reduction targets of GHG emissions.

天然林更好

In the past, the carbon uptake potential of letting forests regrow naturally was underestimated by 32 percent, on average--and by as much as 53 percent in tropical forests, according to a 2020 study in Nature. Now, scientists are calling for more attention to this forestation strategy.

In a 2019 study in Nature, Lewis and his colleagues estimated that if all 350 million hectares were allowed to regrow natural forest, those lands would sequester about 42 billion metric tons of carbon by 2100. Conversely, if the land were to be filled with single-tree commercial crop plantations, carbon storage drops to about 1 billion metric tons.

If it’s just a matter of what’s best for the climate, natural forest regrowth offers the biggest bang for the buck and clearing land to plant the crop plantations and frequent harvesting of the trees can actually release more carbon than they sequester.

别的限制因素

But two US-based teams--led by Johan Six of the University of California at Davis and Peter Reich at the University of Minnesota--say this(指代只依靠种树) is a false hope.

Insufficient amounts of nitrogen gas, they say, will limit plant growth regardless of how much extra carbon dioxide is available. Nitrogen levels, also essential for plant growth, are not rising as fast as those of carbon dioxide. This means there is a limit to how fast plants can grow, and therefore how much carbon dioxide they can absorb, say the researchers.

The scientists also found that even when nitrogen was not the limiting factor, other nutrients that were in short supply had the same restrictive effect.

不仅仅是种树（最次要原因）

There’s too much focus on numbers of seedlings planted, and too little time spent on how to keep the trees alive in the long term, or in working with local communities. And there’s not enough emphasis on how different types of forests sequester very different amounts of carbon. There’s too much talk about trees, and not enough about other carbon-storing ecosystems.

还需人为减排

The world’s oceans and land-based ecosystems, such as forests, absorb about half of the carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning and other industrial activities. The rest goes into the atmosphere. So “the majority of the solution to climate change will need to come from reducing our emissions,”

But while there’s potential for using reforestation as a climate mitigation tool, there are also many factors to consider and planting trees will never be a substitute for decreasing fossil fuel emissions.

“I feel there’s a strong possibility that a significant portion of these lands can be reforested to their original forest cover,” said Saatchi, an expert in global forest carbon stocks and dynamics. “It’s definitely not a solution by itself to addressing current climate change. To do that, we need to reduce human emissions of greenhouse gases. But it could still have some partial impact on our ability to reduce climate change.