英语听力精选进阶版 7697（在线收听）

The British Prime Minister David Cameron has hailed the London one-day international conference on Somalia as a "turning point" towards greater stability and prosperity. He said agreements had been reached on major issues, such as security, piracy , humanitarian assistance and Somalia's political process. Somalia's Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali said he'd like to see air strikes against the Islamist militant group al-Shabab, which recently joined forces with al-Qaeda.

伦敦召开索马里问题国际会议，英国首相戴维德·卡梅隆称赞这是朝着更加稳定与繁荣方向的“转折点”。他说已就主要问题达成协议，包括安全、海盗、人道主义援助和索马里的政治进程。索马里总理穆罕默德·阿里说，他乐意看到对伊斯兰阿尔沙巴布军事组织进行空袭，该组织最近与基地组织开始联合行动。

"We welcome the targeted air strikes against al-Qaeda in Somalia, and reason being al-Qaeda in Somalia is not a Somali problem; it is a global problem, and it has to be addressed globally. So, therefore, we have to have a common strategy against this common enemy." Al-Shabab condemned the meeting.

“我们希望对索马里的基地组织实施空袭，因为索马里的基地组织不仅是索马里的问题，而是全球性问题，必须在全球范围内予以打击。因此，我们必须实施共同的战略来对付共同的敌人。”阿尔沙巴布组织对这次会议予以谴责。

Dozens of Syrians are reported to have been killed in new attacks against opposition strongholds across the country by the security forces. Activists say that 13 members of one family have been killed in the village of Kfartoun near Hama. Homs, Deraa and Deir al-Zour have also come under attack.

A French journalist wounded in the Syrian city of Homs on Wednesday has made a video appeal asking to be evacuated to Lebanon. Edith Bouvier, a freelance journalist working for Le Figaro newspaper, says her femur is broken. Doctors looking after her said she had life-threatening injuries. The paper's foreign editor Philippe Gelie told the BBC she needed proper medical attention.

"She's conscious. She looks ok, but also she's quite aware of her situation. She needs a, you know, surgical operation, you know, in a proper environment. So we have to take her out of Homs quite quickly, and that's the most difficult part of course."

The court-martial has opened near Washington of the American soldier Bradley Manning, who's accused of passing hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the Wikileaks website. Paul Adams reports from Washington.

华盛顿附近的军事法庭开审美国士兵布拉德利·曼宁，他被指控向维基解密网提供上万份秘密文件。Paul Adams在华盛顿报道。

This is the start of what could be a protracted process. Bradley Manning has now been formally charged with 22 separate offences, including aiding America's enemies. But after hearing the charges, the 24-year-old soldier exercised his right - not to enter a plea or to choose whether to be tried by a military jury or judge alone. If found guilty, he could face a maximum sentence of life in prison. The prosecution will say that he leaked more than 700,000 documents to Wikileaks. His defence will counter that he was a troubled soldier who should never have had access to such a large quantity of classified material.

这个审判可谓是一再拖延，布拉德利·曼宁现已被正式指控犯下包括通敌罪在内的22项罪行。但这名24岁的士兵听了指控后就履行了自己的权利，没有为自己辩护，也没有选择是受军事陪审团审问或是单独裁决。如果确认有罪，他将面临终身监禁。控方称曼宁向维基解密泄露了70多万份文件，他的辩护者说他是个有问题的士兵，根本不应该接触到这么大规模的秘密文件。

Doubts have been raised about an experiment which stunned the scientific world last year when it appeared to show subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light. Researchers at the Cern laboratory near Geneva now say they've found flaws in the way that sophisticated clocks were set up to measure the speed of neutrinos.

去年的一项实验貌似表明亚原子微粒的速度超过光速，当时这个消息震惊了科学界，然而如今有人开始对该实验表示怀疑。日内瓦附近的欧洲粒子物理研究所的研究者称，他们发现用于测量微中子速度的精密时钟的设置有问题。

BBC News

A report by the human rights organisation Amnesty International says about 400 Afghans a day are fleeing their homes because of the armed conflict in the country. It says about half a million Afghans are now displaced. It also accuses Afghan officials of failing to let international aid agencies help the displaced. A senior Afghan official told the BBC that such allegations were baseless.

American officials have had their first direct talks with North Korea since Kim Jong-un took power after his father's death. The US envoy Glyn Davies described the talk as "serious and substantive". The United States is offering food aid in exchange for North Korea abandoning its nuclear arms programmes. Michael Bristow reports from Beijing.

The US envoy to these talks, Glyn Davies, said little following two meetings with North Korean officials in Beijing. He said the talks had covered a number of issues but didn't want to go into details. That discussions were "serious and substantive" was all he would say. The two sides are due to meet again on Friday.

The Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is to travel to Cuba on Friday for a new cancer operation. It's in the same area where he had a cancerous tumour removed last year. Mr Chavez has said the lesion is probably malignant and warned that he'll have to reduce his workload ahead of presidential elections in October. The Venezuelan leader had previously declared himself cancer-free.

委内瑞拉总统雨果·查韦斯周五将赴古巴做癌手术，去年他也是在古巴进行癌肿瘤摘除手术的。查韦斯称病情可能会致命，他警告说，他必须在10月份总统大选之前减少工作量。这名委内瑞拉领导人曾称自己不会得癌症。

New research suggests it may have been only relatively mild drought conditions that led to the demise of the highly developed Mayan civilisation, which flourished until about 1,100 years ago in parts of what's now Mexico and Guatemala. Scientists have long thought that repeated severe drought produced the decline. But Mexican and British researchers now think that a sustained drop in rainfall of no more than 40% was enough to ensure that evaporation of water from the reservoirs outstripped replenishment.

新研究表明，可能是相对温和的干旱导致了曾经高度发达的玛雅文明的消失。在如今的墨西哥和危地马拉，该文明直到约1100年前还很繁荣。长期以来，科学家认为是多次严重的旱灾导致文明的消亡。但如今，墨西哥和英国的研究人员认为小于40%的降雨减少量就足以使蓄水池的水的蒸发量超过补给量。