W6 - Scottish independence: Queen was asked to intervene amid yes vote fears

Scottish independence: Queen was asked to intervene amid yes vote fears

Amid No 10 meltdown, cabinet secretary and monarch’s private secretary crafted words that voters should ‘think very carefully’

The Guardian, Tuesday 16 December 2014 21.23 GMT

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Senior figures in Whitehall and Downing Street became so fearful that the Scottish independence referendum could lead to the breakup of the United Kingdom that the Queen was asked to make a rare public intervention in the final days of the campaign.

Britain’s most senior civil servant and the Queen’s private secretary crafted a carefully worded intervention by the monarch, as No 10 experienced what one senior official described as “meltdown” in the closing stages of the campaign after polls showed growing support for a yes vote.

The discussions between Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Christopher Geidt for the palace, led the Queen to issue an appeal to the people of Scotland four days before the referendum in September to “think very carefully” before casting their vote.

The delicate negotiations in the runup to the intervention by the Queen, which were described by one senior Whitehall source as a warning to voters that they were facing “a decision filled with foreboding”, are revealed by the Guardian on the final day of a two-part series about the Scottish referendum campaign.

The Queen, who has been scrupulous during her 62-year reign in observing the impartiality expected of a constitutional monarch, intervened publicly on 14 September. Speaking after Sunday service outside Crathie Kirk near her Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire, the Queen told a wellwisher: “Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future.”

She spoke out after senior Whitehall figures, who were apprised of David Cameron’s concerns that the yes camp was developing an ominous momentum in the final period of the campaign, suggested to the palace that an intervention by the Queen would be helpful.

The suggestion was made during the last few weeks of the referendum after a YouGov/Times poll on Tuesday 2 September reported a six-point fall in support for the pro-UK side in a month. Key figures in Downing Street and Whitehall, led by the prime minister and the cabinet secretary, assessed all the options they could deploy to halt what appeared to be the yes side’s momentum.

Cameron discussed the referendum with the Queen a week before her public intervention when he travelled to Balmoral for his annual visit. On that trip, there was a particular focus on the referendum when the campaign was electrified by the publication of another poll, a Sunday Times/YouGov survey on 7 September, the final day of the prime minister’s Balmoral visit, which gave the yes side its first lead – by 51% to 49%.

The Whitehall source added that the referendum was discussed during Cameron’s Balmoral stay. “I don’t think it was frosty. I think there might have been the odd humorous comment over the porridge about supposing he had some work to do next week.”

The prime minister is said to have talked about the Queen’s humour on the occasion to friends. There was also a suggestion that the atmosphere had, at times, been frosty. You could imagine the chilly atmosphere at the breakfast table, the prime minister is said to have remarked to friends afterwards.

Discussions about interventions by the monarch are by convention a matter for the cabinet secretary and palace officials. This explains why the contacts in the runup to the Queen’s public comments took place between Heywood and Geidt, described by the Whitehall source as the two key figures at the heart of Britain’s “deep state”.

The two men are understood to have initially discussed the wisdom of a public intervention by the monarch, who is scrupulously impartial. Once it became clear that the Queen was minded to speak out, Geidt and Heywood then needed to fashion language which, while broadly neutral, would leave nobody in any doubt about her support for the union.

There was a determination to ensure she did not cross a line, as some said she did when she spoke of the benefits of the UK in her silver jubilee address to a joint session of parliament in 1977. In remarks which were seen as an attempt by the Labour government of Jim Callaghan to warn of the dangers posed by the Scottish National party after it had won 11 seats in the October 1974 general election, she said: “I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps this jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings, on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom.”

The Whitehall source said the Queen’s intervention was carefully calibrated. “She knew exactly what she was doing, which is, there are two possible responses on the referendum. [They are] either: one, you buy into this is a fantastic festival of democracy, or two, you suggest this is a decision filled with foreboding. So by saying I hope people will think carefully you imply the second. So if they’d said: ‘What do you think of the referendum ma’am?’ and she’d said: ‘Oh it’s lovely’, that would be very different. Without her taking a side, it cast just the right element of doubt over the nature of the decision.”

The final day of the Guardian’s Scotland referendum series also highlights Gordon Brown’s pivotal role in helping to save the UK in the final period of campaigning. Cameron and George Osborne were so nervous about a yes vote, which would have thrown his premiership into a potentially fatal crisis, that camp beds were laid on for senior officials in Downing Street on the night of the referendum count.

The dominance of the referendum explains why a relieved Cameron told the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an overheard conversation days after the referendum, that the Queen had “purred down the line” when he told her the result.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the discussions between Geidt and Heywood. A Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: “We do not comment on discussions between the Queen’s private secretary and civil servants.” A Downing Street spokesman said: “No comment.”

A palace spokesman said of the prime minister’s discussions with the Queen at Balmoral: “As is the convention, we do not comment on conversations between the prime minister and the Queen.” A Downing Street spokesman said: “We do not discuss the prime minister’s conversations with Her Majesty the Queen.”

• This article was amended on 17 December 2014. An earlier version said Samantha Cameron had accompanied the prime minister to Balmoral in September. That is not the case.

Vocab.

apprised - 通報

ominous - 不吉利的

momentum - 氣勢

referendum  - 公投

deploy - 部署

halt - 停止

when - Tuesday 16 December 2014 21.23 GMT

where - UK

why - Scotland was to vote for their independence.

What - Right before the referendum, Queen was asked to have an intervention to show her opinion over the vote.

how - Queen was asked to an intervention, and she told the Scottish to think about it very carefully.

who - Mainly the Queen.

W6-Why Haven’t We Found a Cure for Ebola in Boston?

In West Africa alone, the World Health Organization reports that the current Ebola outbreak— the most severe on record—has killed more than 6,000 out of the 17,000 people who have contracted it. Here in Boston, you could literally bump into someone working on a cure, but it’s a process often hampered by lack of funding and facilities.

Across the river, the Wyss Institute at Harvard University has developed a device that may be able to remove Ebola (and other pathogens) from the bloodstream. Researchers at the Sabeti Lab at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have attempted to unlock the way the virus works by sequencing and analyzing more than 99 Ebola virus genomes. They also catalogued 395 mutations.

Before this year’s outbreak, many Americans had never heard of Ebola. But the virus isn’t new. It first emerged in 1976, and over the decades, the Ebolavirus genus has mutated into five strains, four of which make humans sick. Though unprecedented in its size and spread in populated areas, the world has seen the 2014 strain, called “Zaire,” before. Researchers say the Zaire strain is more than 90 percent identical to the virus that caused the first known outbreak. It’s slightly more similar to an outbreak that happened in 1995, and it’s even more similar to a 2007 outbreak.Down Huntington Avenue, Northeastern University bio and chemical engineers are using nanotechnology to kill Ebola and stop it from mutating.

It’s been almost 40 years since we first saw Zaire ebolavirus. So why aren’t we further along on a cure? Research on viruses like Ebola in Boston often gets to a certain point, then must take a pause until the timing, funding, and available facilities align to test researchers’ theories. This can add years of delay to an already complicated process.

Facilities

At this point, the only places that can work with the Zaire ebolavirus and its mutations are biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories with the safety protocols and isolation components required to work with dangerous and rare viruses. But there are approximately 10 labs like this in the United States, at different stages of clearance and construction, which can create a bottleneck for research.

Boston actually has one of those labs. The National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory (NEIDL) was built by Boston University on its South End medical school campus in 2008. BSL-2 and BSL-3 research is performed there, but between the political, legal, and regulatory hurdles (not to mention the outcry from the surrounding community), the BSL-4 lab has yet to open (and the BSL-3 only opened in January of this year).

As the Ebola outbreak raged last fall, NEIDL was in the midst of inspections by the Boston Public Health Commission and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to hopefully, finally, clear the last hurdles so researchers can get to work.

At Boston University School of Medicine’s microbiology lab, virologist John Connor is one of the researchers waiting for the lab to open. Connor’s team has been collaborating with other BSL-4 labs in the country for the past five years on building a portable diagnostic test tool ideal for remote areas with limited electricity. Connor has National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for his diagnostic work, so it’s progressing and continuing to be tested. But he says he wishes it could have all taken place closer to home.

“Having a facility that can operate safely and effectively in close proximity to lots of intelligent people should speed up a lot of the development process, because it’s a lot easier to have conversations and get things started when it’s 15 minutes on the T and on the No. 10 bus, versus going down to the CDC or the NIH,” Connor said. “There’s a ceiling on the amount of work that can be done because of the amount of facilities.”

For the past four years, Connor has also been developing treatments for rare viruses including Ebola, but they might not see light by the time this outbreak is contained.

“What we’re really trying to do is find new ways that people haven’t tried before to find molecules that look and find the Achilles heel in viruses like Ebola,” said Connor. Before the Zaire ebolavirus reemerged in 2014, Connor’s team in March published research identifying a small molecule that inhibits Ebola (and other viruses) from replication. These molecules could lead to the development of an antiviral treatment that stops the virus from growing in a sick person.

“The life cycle of the virus is that it comes into a cell, and then it’s supposed to make copies of itself, and then brings in genetic material and makes copies of that genetic material to make a new virus cell and RNA delivery,” Connor said. “The molecule we developed appears to block that engine.”

Down the hall from Connor, Elke Mühlberger is researching enzymes to train the molecules Connor discovered to block the Ebola virus’s replication. But her work at the NEIDL lab and collaboration with Connor’s team can only go so far without BSL-4 facilities.

The team has managed to prove their Ebola antiviral works in a culture at other BSL-4 labs, but now Connor is waiting to test whether the molecule inhibits the virus in a small animal. Then, they can escalate to a non-human primate, and finally, submit their research for approval with the FDA to test a small group of patients. That’s a five-year timeline—without any delays.

Funding

Unfortunately, Connor’s team lacks the funding from the NIH to take the antiviral research forward, even if the NEIDL resources were fully available. It’s a common story these days.

Connor’s antiviral project has been on hold for over a year and a half. Although the Food and Drug Administration has sped along the development of a few Ebola vaccines, his project is too far behind in the process to be escalated. Even if it wasn’t, Connor says vaccines that protect people and contain Ebola’s spread tend to get preference over therapeutic treatments.

“The likelihood of developing post therapeutic treatments is much less [than a vaccine],” Connor said. “If you use a post exposure therapeutic, you can protect the people that were affected. If you use a vaccine, you can not only protect the people who have been infected but also the people who have not yet been infected and ideally limit the prospects of it happening again.”

The NIH has been working on a vaccine for the Zaire ebolavirus since 2001. After 13 years of work, it has reached animal trials. But when the outbreak began to spread rapidly this summer, the vaccine had not reached a phase 1 clinical trial to be tested on humans. Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, blamed the cut in research funding for slowing down all research, but especially the development of vaccines for infectious diseases.

“I have to tell you, if we had not gone through this 10-year decline in the support of biomedical research, we would be a year or two ahead of where we are now,” Collins said at House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health in September. “And think about the difference that would make, had we in 2014 been in the position to distribute rapidly tens of thousands of doses, in collaboration with our colleagues at GSK, of this vaccine, how much different would this be and how many lives would have been saved.”

Connor said progress is very difficult when it’s so hard to find research dollars. “We’ve worked for a number of years developing antiviral candidates to target these nasty viruses, and the work we’re doing there is important,” said Connor. “And the NIH agrees with us, but the money just isn’t there.”

And neither is a cure.

Correction: A previous version of this article identified The Broad Institute as part of Harvard. The Broad Institute is an independent organization affiliated with Harvard and MIT. The picture of the researcher is at the Broad Institute, not the Sabeti lab as previously captioned.

From: http://www.boston.com/health/2014/12/08/why-haven-found-cure-for-ebola-boston/MSlcjIbkLmuNCycszqhJGJ/story.html

Vocab. 

literally -從字面上

sequencing - 排序

genomes - 基因組

catalogued - 編目

mutations - 突變

strain - 應變

unprecedented - 史無前例

align - 調整

protocol - 協議

hurdles - 障礙

when-12.08.14 | 6:23 PM

where- Boston, US

why- not enough facilities

what- reserchers have worked on finding cure for Ebolavirus, but delayed due to lack of facility.

how- One team actually have found a cure for Ebola, but now the process of developing the cure is stopped beacuse of the lack of facilities.

Week 4 - MH17 Dutch memorial day: Air disaster that touched a nation

MH17 Dutch memorial day: Air disaster that touched a nation

By Anna HolliganBBC News, The Hague

Wreckage from flight MH17 lies undisturbed at the village of Rassipnoe

Continue reading the main story

MH17 crash

• What we know
• Report key findings
• Passenger 'had oxygen mask on'
• Faces of MH17

Less than four months after a Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 298 people was shot out of the sky over rebel-held territory in east Ukraine, a national memorial to the victims is taking place in the Netherlands.

The names of each of the victims will be read out on Monday in front of an audience including King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima inside the Amsterdam RAI arena.

Such was the impact of the MH17 crash here that 17 July 2014 is often referred to as the Netherlands' 9/11.

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Hans de Borst said he could not believe he would never see his daughter's smile again

The relatives all have agonising stories, intensified by the crash site being in a conflict zone.

The Dutch investigation team has been unable to access the area, but Robby Oehlers has been there, to search for his cousin, Daisy.

"I had a perception that I could just walk around and find her. In your dreams you see her lying there in the field."

All that the forensic teams have found so far is a piece of Daisy's hip bone. For many of the 298 families, tiny fragments such as these are all they have to mourn.

"You don't know if you'll get anything else," says Robby. "So then there's the question, do we bury this tiny piece or should we wait for more?"

Daisy, 20, was off on an adventure with her boyfriend, Bryce. The young couple lived together at his parents' home in Rotterdam.

Robby felt it was his duty to search for his cousin Daisy and her boyfriend Bryce

The room has been left the way it was the day they left. Rumpled sheets on the bed, the door swung open in excitement. His family are determined to retain what little traces of them remain.

Sitting on the bow of his houseboat in Amsterdam, Robby describes the duty he felt to search for the couple.

Unlike the Dutch government, he negotiated with the pro-Russian rebels to reach the site and was astounded by what he found.

Bodies still concertinaed between the seats; burnt and broken pieces of bone.

He is one of many relatives confused and frustrated by the Dutch government's failure to repatriate all the passengers' body parts. "They could have talked to Ukraine and talked to the rebels to ask them to stop shooting, but they didn't."

298 victims from 10 countries

• Netherlands: 196
• Malaysia: 42
• Australia: 27
• Indonesia: 11
• UK: 10
• Belgium: 4
• Germany: 3
• Philippines: 3
• Canada: 1
• New Zealand: 1

For the Dutch government, it has been a point of principle not to speak to the separatists. Direct negotiations would have made the government vulnerable and open to blackmail, it was felt.

And using force was ruled out by PM Mark Rutte from the outset because of the risk of escalating the conflict.

Although the Dutch investigation team has not gone to the site, Dutch forensic scientists have been able to recover more remains and belongings, and as recently as Saturday they were flown back to Eindhoven.

Nine of the 298 victims are yet to be identified and there is little hope that they ever will.

Rebels blamed

Robby Oehlers feels more could have been done and he is angry Mr Rutte chose to visit Malaysia and Australia last week, where many of the other victims came from.

"Don't fly to other countries and say how sorry you are. Just get your trucks, get the plane, get all the body parts. Not one arm and one leg. Everything," he says.

Many Western countries have accused pro-Russian separatists of downing the flight with a surface-to-air missile. The Russians say their satellite images show a Ukrainian fighter jet in the vicinity at the time.

According to the preliminary aviation report, the Malaysia Airlines plane was hit by a large number of high-energy objects.

The criminal investigations expect to deliver their findings by 2016.

Robby's fear is the longer the mangled wreckage lies scattered in fields in eastern Ukraine, the less chance there is of ever finding the truth.

In the days after the disaster, Mr Rutte asked the country to have faith in a diplomatic solution, but Robby Oehlers has lost his.

There is no sense of urgency and it is not going to happen, he believes.

The 196 Dutch victims of MH17 came from all over the Netherlands. It is said here that everyone knew someone, or knows someone who knew someone on board.

Don Vleesenbeek lost his younger brother Erik, who was on his way to Bali.

Brothers in arms: Don (L) with his younger brother Erik who had been on his way to Bali

For Don Vleesenbeek, selling white wristbands came as a distraction after losing his brother Erik

"There was life before the 17th of July and life after. But they are not the same," he says at his cafe in the fortified village of Grave, a short distance outside the southern city of Nijmegen.

Don was among hundreds of relatives who stood by the side of the runway at Eindhoven air base to welcome the first military aircraft when they flew coffins carrying victims' remains back from Ukraine six days after the crash.

At the time, he was wearing a white wristband with the message, "We will never forget you".

He went on to sell 50,000 of these wristbands to raise money for charity and offer other families and supporters a silent way to show their sympathy.

"My brother was always smiling. He always wanted to help people. Selling the wristbands was just a spontaneous decision, I suppose I needed a distraction."

He still wears one, and he has had Erik's name tattooed on his left forearm.

After leaving Don's café, we head east to Rosmalen, a small town hit by a double tragedy.

'Now there is nothing'

Two families, living opposite each other on Grote Pagestraat, were both on board flight MH17.

The Truggs and the Wels had three children between them. In total, there were 80 children on the plane.

A mountain of cuddly toys stands outside their front doors and a candle flickers outside. These family homes seem frozen in time.

Elsemiek from The Hague, a 17-year-old, was Hans de Borst's only child.

Although he offers me black coffee, croissants and currant buns his mind is elsewhere. His living room is bursting with her memory.

"I keep on expecting her to walk through the door. Or to come cycling over.

"She was my future. And now there is nothing."

One photo shows Elsemiek grinning beside her father; it was taken just a few days before her death.

"I get angry when people tell me it must have been her time. It wasn't her time. She was just becoming a young woman. She knew what she wanted. She had big plans for the future."

Hans hasn't been back to work since the disaster. He says he's lost his reason for living. He is still struggling to make sense of why his daughter is no longer there.

"It is your own flesh and blood. She was part of me and now she's gone."

Parts of the plane were found 8km (5 miles) from the main debris site
From: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29930427
when - 10 November 2014where - not givenwhat - MH17 crashed, and relatives of victims announce some criticswhy - They thought the Dutch government didn't gave immediate responses after the crashwho - relatives of MH17 victimshow - some of the relatives went to the spot to find their families, while some of them felt disappointed after their dears left.

WEEK 2 - World Cup: Why Brazil should have won.

World Cup: Why Brazil should have won

By Richard Allen Greene, CNN

July 14, 2014 -- Updated 1055 GMT (1855 HKT)

 (CNN) -- It's all over now. Germany won the World Cup, which can't have surprised anyone who watched it demolish Brazil en route to the championship.

But according to CNN's calculations, Brazil should have taken home the trophy.

While Lionel Messi was battling Thomas Muller to be the tournament's top goal scorer, while Tim Howard and Guillermo Ochoa were batting away shots on goal, while Roy Hodgson and Fabio Capello were stalking the sidelines, CNN was looking at the bigger picture.

We started with the FIFA world ranking for each team going into the World Cup, starting with Spain ranked number one, all the way down to Australia at 62.

Then we looked at how much each country was paying its manager.

Russia topped that table, paying Capello nearly $11.5 million a year, according to Nick Harris of Sporting Intelligence. England came a distant second, with Italy, Brazil and Switzerland rounding out the top five.

Soccer-mad Mexico came dead last, paying manager Miguel Herrera about $214,000.

Next we added in each country's population size, since bigger countries have larger pools to draw potential soccer stars from. The United States was the biggest country to qualify, followed by Brazil, Nigeria, Russia and Japan. Bosnia-Herzegovina and Uruguay were the smallest, both with populations under 4 million.

Then we averaged the three measures -- ranking, manager salary and population size -- to come up with our own prediction for how each team would fare in the World Cup.

Our predicted winner: Brazil. It was the second-largest country in the tournament, ranked third in the world by FIFA, and with manager Luiz Felipe Scolari's $3.8 million salary putting him fourth.

It fared well enough in the group stages, but once things got serious, the hosts completely fell apart, conceding 10 goals in their last two matches and scoring only 1.

That left it in 4th place, three below where we predicted it should end up.

Germany, on the other hand, overperformed, but not by much.

We picked it to come second, and it came first, for a rating of +1.

Our statistics also tell us who the biggest over- and under-achievers of the tournament were.

Some are obvious. The numbers suggest Costa Rica should have come 27th overall, but it trounced the big boys in the Group of Death and came out 8th, by FIFA's official statistics.

Second-place Argentina also did far better than our predictions.

Yes, it was ranked fifth in the world going into the tournament, but it didn't shell out big money for a manager -- Alejandro Sabella was the 22nd-best paid coach -- and Argentina falls in the middle of the population table. Of course, having Messi be one member of that population makes a difference, even if the Hand of God didn't touch him in the final.

Spain, on the other hand, was a giant dud. Ranked third in the CNN table, it actually came 23rd.

Only one nation came out worse: England. Ranked 10th in the world, with the second-best paid manager and and the 11th-largest population, we think it should have come fifth. It came 26th.

Italy and Russia also suffered in our rankings, partly for paying their managers so handsomely. We say Italy should have come third, not 22nd, and Russia should have tied at sixth place with the United States.

Russia actually came 24th, while Team USA came 15th.

The numbers also show one remarkable coincidence. On paper, Belgium and Greece are almost identical.

Belgium was ranked 11th by FIFA. Greece was ranked 12th.

Both have populations of about 11 million people, and the two nations paid their managers exactly the same salary.

Both teams did better than we predicted.

We picked Greece to come 18th, but it managed 13th.

Belgium did even better, coming sixth, nine places higher than our calculations suggested.

CNN's Patrick Sung, Manuela Lanza and John Sinnott contributed to this report.

From : http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/14/sport/football/world-cup-cnn-who-should-have-won/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

where-Brazil 
when-July 14, 2014
why-Germany won the champion, but the calculation shows that Brazil should have won it.
who- Brazil soccer team
what- explain why Brazil should won the 1st in FIFA World Cup in three mainly viewpoints.
how- Due to different populations, salary paid to the coach and the rank during the forehead tournament.

WORDS TO KNOW:
trophy - 錦標
tournament - 錦標賽
stalk - 悄悄走近
concede - 失球

dud - 無用的人

WEEK 1 - What happened with Asiana Flight 214?

What happened with Asiana Flight 214?

updated 10:00 PM EDT, Fri July 12, 2013

Asiana Airlines Flight 214 originated in Seoul, South Korea, destined for San Francisco. Here's what we know about Saturday's crash landing. 
Full story »

3 minutes
BEFORE IMPACT

The flight descended faster and more steeply than previous flights on this same route.

The graph to the right, showing approximate altitude data from FlightAware.com, displays approach information from the same flight the day before the crash and Saturday's approach, which indicates a steeper decline in altitude.

Note: NTSB investigators have found nothing to corroborate online flight tracking records, such as the ones shown here, that Saturday's Flight 214 descended from cruising altitude much more steeply and rapidly than previous Asiana flights on the same route. The National Transportation Safety Board says it found no "abnormally steep descent data."

7 seconds
BEFORE IMPACT

A preliminary readout from the flight data and cockpit voice recorders shows the aircraft was approaching well below the target landing speed of 137 knots (157 mph).

At seven seconds before impact, the pilots are heard acknowledging the slow speed and attempted to spool up the engines to increase the plane's speed.

4 seconds
BEFORE IMPACT

At four seconds, the plane's computer triggers a "stick-shaker" warning, indicating an impending aerodynamic stall. A stall occurs when there is not enough airspeed to sustain lift to keep the aircraft in flight.

3 seconds
BEFORE IMPACT

The flight data recorder shows the lowest recorded airspeed during the approach, at 103 knots (118 mph). At this time, the engine power was recorded at 50% and increasing.

One of the crew members call out for a "go-around," an attempt to abort the landing. Both engines were producing power up to the time of impact, according to investigators.

1.5 seconds
BEFORE IMPACT

At 1.5 seconds before impact, a second call for a go-around is made, this time by another member of the crew.

Passengers on board describe hearing the engines spooling up and the nose tilting up just before impact.

Impact

The flight data recorder indicated an airspeed of 106 knots (122 mph) at the time of the crash, well below the targeted 137 knots.

According to investigators, the plane's main landing gear struck the rock sea wall well before the start of the runway, followed by the tail section of the aircraft.

NTSB investigators discovered the lower portion of the tail cone in the rocks of the sea wall, as well as a significant piece of the tail found in the water. Additional parts were reportedly visible in the water at low tide.

Watch exclusive video of the crash landing 

Three flight attendants in the rear of the plane were ejected from the aircraft during impact, and were found injured beside the runway.

The debris field runs from the water, slightly right of the paved threshold and runway center, all the way to the stopped aircraft fuselage. Pieces of the cabin were discovered very early on in the debris field, including aircraft parts, galley materials, newspapers, and magazines, according to investigators.

One of the eight doors on the aircraft was separated during the impact. The remaining seven doors were found attached to the fuselage.

The rest of the Boeing 777's tail section, including its vertical and horizontal stabilizers, was found near the end of the paved threshold, just before the start of the runway. Total loss of the tail section would have made the aircraft extremely difficult to control.

The fuselage came to rest off the left side of the runway, and it's pointed toward the right.

The right engine is detached from the wing and wedged against the right side of the fuselage, catching fire due to an oil tank rupture. The left engine detached from the wing during the crash and is a considerable distance from the fuselage in a grassy area to the right of Runway 28L.

After impact

Most of the fire damage to the aircraft occurred after the Boeing 777 came to a stop on its belly, but most of the passengers were able to evacuate before fire breached the passenger cabin. Passengers described the cabin interior as heavily damaged, with overhead bins dropping and two life raft/escape slides inflating inside the aircraft, trapping two flight attendants, whom passengers and other crew members helped free.

The coroner says one of the two passengers killed appears to have been run over by an emergency vehicle, but final cause of death has not been determined. Asiana has identified the two deceased as Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia of China. Both were 16.

The crew

There were three pilots in the cockpit at the time of the crash, according to crew interviews conducted by investigators.

The "flying pilot" -- as NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman referred to him -- was a veteran pilot with nearly 10,000 hours of total flying time, though he was in his "initial operating experience" in flying the Boeing 777. He had flown 10 legs and had about 35 hours of flying time with the 777, which put him about halfway through the required training of 20 legs and 60 flight hours, when the plane went down, Hersman said.

Sitting next to the "flying pilot" in the right seat was an instructor pilot -- another veteran captain with an estimated 13,000 hours of total flying time. The instructor pilot told investigators he was the pilot in command at the time of the crash. This was the first time he and the pilot he was instructing had flown together, and the first time he had acted as an instructor pilot.

In the cockpit jumpseat was a relief first officer with an estimated 900 - 1,000 hours of flying time on the 777.

A fourth pilot, the relief captain, was seated in the passenger cabin during the crash. The relief captain and relief first officer had flown the aircraft during the cruise portion of the trans-Pacific flight, allowing the flying pilot and instructor pilot to rest and eat during the flight.

Of the pilots in the cockpit, only the relief first officer was injured -- neither of the two pilots at the controls were admitted to the hospital. The pilots did not undergo drug or alcohol testing after Saturday's crash landing, Hersman said. The United States does not have "oversight" of foreign-based operators or their crews.

From： http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2013/07/us/asiana-214/index.html

where-San Francisco

when-July 6, 2013

who-all the passengers and crew on Asiana Flight 214

what-the plane crashed when lading

why-Saturday's Flight 214 descended from cruising altitude much more steeply 

        and rapidly than previous Asiana flights on the same route.

how- Because the plane were flying much higher than usual attitude when approaching, 

         the pilot descended the plane but too extremely, the plane crashed eventually due to stall.

Keywords:

preliminary - 初步的

readout - 判讀

impending - 即將到來的

aerodynamic - 空氣動力學

abort - 中止

cone - 錐體

rear - 後面

eject - 噴出

debris - 碎片

fuselage - 飛機機身

detach - 分離

rupture - 破裂

veteran - 老將;資深者