Questões de Inglês - Reading/Writing

Black Lives Matter isn't about statues or TV shows. It's about real lives being ruined

Nosheen Iqbal

    In the past six weeks, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been contacted about police brutality in Britain. As a reporter, I’ve been sent photos of a black child picked up and thrown to the ground by an officer on Hampstead Heath. I’ve witnessed a dozen officers chase and aggressively pin an unarmed black 14-yearold boy on to his belly in a Tottenham park. I’ve been emailed a video of black teenagers cuffed, harassed and searched by officers while their white friend can only watch. You simply have to open your eyes and look.

    These are desperate and enraging stories. Many are barely investigated and rarely reported. It’s difficult to hold the police to account on every individual case when details are lost – the officer’s badge number, or the phone number of a witness – when the victims are traumatised and worn down. Basically, when they’re real people with real lives that don’t fit the script of what makes a newsworthy victim.

    It’s harder still when there is an institutional denial that something is wrong, even when the stats tells us otherwise: in London black men aged 15 to 24 were stopped and searched more than 20,000 times during lockdown, a figure that equates to 30% of young black men in the capital, although some may have been searched more than once. More than 80% of these cases led to no further action.

    Every Black Lives Matter event I’ve been to in recent weeks has felt political and urgent. Black, white, brown people and more are marching for equality in jobs, housing and health. Black male graduates, for instance, are paid on average 17% less than their white counterparts; the ethnic pay gap for men and women across industries is wide and it is pronounced. This is the change people are asking for.

    They want justice for black police victims, for refugees, for trans people, for Grenfell. They want protection for frontline workers dying at alarming rates from Covid-19 who, because of the way society sifts and sorts itself, disproportionately come from ethnic minorities. They are refusing to shut up and just accept small progressive gains made decade by decade. This should be inspiring for all of us; it shouldn’t be repackaged as a national threat.

    If you simply want a better, more equal world, where justice is real and not simply a slogan, it’s worth attending a Black Lives Matter rally. If you can go to a protest, do. Bear witness to what is genuinely being fought for. Black Lives Matter isn’t just a viral brand. It isn’t a political party. It shouldn’t be defined by its quickest and loudest critics. As a movement, it draws in everyone, and everyone should see that they have a stake in it. Ultimately, it’s about changing all our futures for the better.

Avaiable at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/10/black-lives-matter-statues-tv-showspolice-brutality. Retrieved on August 1, 2020. Adapted.

Black Lives Matter isn't about statues or TV shows. It's about real lives being ruined

Nosheen Iqbal

    In the past six weeks, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been contacted about police brutality in Britain. As a reporter, I’ve been sent photos of a black child picked up and thrown to the ground by an officer on Hampstead Heath. I’ve witnessed a dozen officers chase and aggressively pin an unarmed black 14-yearold boy on to his belly in a Tottenham park. I’ve been emailed a video of black teenagers cuffed, harassed and searched by officers while their white friend can only watch. You simply have to open your eyes and look.

    These are desperate and enraging stories. Many are barely investigated and rarely reported. It’s difficult to hold the police to account on every individual case when details are lost – the officer’s badge number, or the phone number of a witness – when the victims are traumatised and worn down. Basically, when they’re real people with real lives that don’t fit the script of what makes a newsworthy victim.

    It’s harder still when there is an institutional denial that something is wrong, even when the stats tells us otherwise: in London black men aged 15 to 24 were stopped and searched more than 20,000 times during lockdown, a figure that equates to 30% of young black men in the capital, although some may have been searched more than once. More than 80% of these cases led to no further action.

    Every Black Lives Matter event I’ve been to in recent weeks has felt political and urgent. Black, white, brown people and more are marching for equality in jobs, housing and health. Black male graduates, for instance, are paid on average 17% less than their white counterparts; the ethnic pay gap for men and women across industries is wide and it is pronounced. This is the change people are asking for.

    They want justice for black police victims, for refugees, for trans people, for Grenfell. They want protection for frontline workers dying at alarming rates from Covid-19 who, because of the way society sifts and sorts itself, disproportionately come from ethnic minorities. They are refusing to shut up and just accept small progressive gains made decade by decade. This should be inspiring for all of us; it shouldn’t be repackaged as a national threat.

    If you simply want a better, more equal world, where justice is real and not simply a slogan, it’s worth attending a Black Lives Matter rally. If you can go to a protest, do. Bear witness to what is genuinely being fought for. Black Lives Matter isn’t just a viral brand. It isn’t a political party. It shouldn’t be defined by its quickest and loudest critics. As a movement, it draws in everyone, and everyone should see that they have a stake in it. Ultimately, it’s about changing all our futures for the better.

Avaiable at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/10/black-lives-matter-statues-tv-showspolice-brutality. Retrieved on August 1, 2020. Adapted.

A BROKEN PEACE

By Jasmin Mujanović

    The Dayton Peace Accords, which formally ended the Bosnian War in 1995, fragmented Bosnia, ensuring that each of the warring ethnic factions – Serb, Croat, and Bosniak – would be left with a patch of territory to call its own, but with the country being treated as a single entity in the international arena. This internal fragmentation was itself the product of ethnic cleansing [limpeza étnica] and genocide, the process by which nationalist militias created neat, mostly homogenous territories, which they hoped could later become essentially autonomous regions. Although the Western diplomats who negotiated Dayton legitimated these violence-based demarcations of land as the price of peace, they believed that reform could establish Bosnia (also known as Bosnia and Herzegovina) as a vibrant, diverse, and democratic society, capable of membership in the European Union.

    Almost a quarter of a century since the end of the Bosnian War, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 100,000 people, the shadow of violence lies over the upcoming elections [Note: These elections were held in October 2018.] in this small country, which is still severely divided along ethnic lines. The leader of Bosnia’s main Serb nationalist bloc, Milorad Dodik, backed by the Kremlin, has militarized the police units under his government’s control. He has also recruited the services of Russian-trained paramilitaries from neighboring Serbia. And Russian militants, recently fighting on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine, are now routinely hosted in his presidential palace in Banja Luka, the de facto capital of the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS), one of the two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina (the other is the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or informally, the Bosniak-Croat Federation). Dodik makes no secret of his intentions: he wants the RS to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is willing to use arms to accomplish exactly that if either the Bosnian state government in Sarajevo or the international community try to stop him.

    Meanwhile, the leader of the primary Croat nationalist bloc, Dragan Čovič, may do the same. Despite the nominal ethnic divisions between their two parties, Čovič and Dodik are united in a shared antipathy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina as a territorially integrated state. Each of them wants to revive the territorial-expansion projects conceived in Belgrade [capital of Serbia] and Zagreb [capital of Croatia] in the 1990s: Dodik wishes for the RS to join Serbia, while Čovič aspires to resuscitate the “Herzeg-Bosna,” possibly with the idea of attaching it to Croatia. Herzeg-Bosna was Zagreb’s version of the RS: a self-declared “republic” from which non-Croats were ethnically cleansed, much as non-Serbs were forced out of the RS. The original architects of both the RS and Herzeg-Bosna have been convicted of dozens of counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague. Yet Dodik and Čovič remain unapologetic in their aim to preserve and revive, respectively, these para-states.

    Though the largest community in the country, the Bosniaks are fractured by provincial disputes. The Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the bloc cofounded by Bosnia’s first president, Alija Izetbegovič, is now purely a vehicle for the enrichment of the Izetbegovič family and their allies. As a result, the past year has seen three major splinter groups [grupos de dissidentes] break off, each accusing Bakir Izetbegovič, Alija’s son and the party’s leader, of rampant corruption and criminality. And for their own part, Bosnia’s leftists and anti-nationalists have managed to split their vote across four different parties, practically ensuring their own massacre at the polls [urnas].

    Amid this game of thrones, the Euro-American alliance that once guaranteed Bosnia’s peace is fragmented by its own factional disputes, and unprepared to intervene in the event of genuine emergency. And beneath it all is a pulsating cacophony of public anger at the country’s corrupt elite, whose decades of self-dealing have left Bosnia as one of the poorest states in Europe. The country is undeniably already on the brink [beira de precipício], and October’s elections could easily push it over the edge.

Adapted from Prospect, October 2018. [Note: Please remember that the country of Bosnia is also known as Bosnia and Herzegovina.]

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Plastic straws, cotton buds and drink stirrers to be banned in England

    Plastic straws and drink stirrers, and cotton buds with plastic stems will be banned from sale and use in England from next April, the government has confirmed. The move, which has been in the offing for more than a year, is hoped to vastly reduce the litter and other environmental impacts of the nearly 5 billion plastic straws currently used each year in England, along with more than 300 million plastic stirrers and close to 2 billion cotton buds with plastic stems.

    Huge numbers of these items, particularly cotton buds, are flushed down toilets or otherwise end up in litter – surveys have recently found waterways across the UK full of plastic, putting wildlife at risk.

    Alternatives are available, including serving drinks without straws or stirrers, which is preferable, or using paper straws and biodegradable products in place of plastic stirrers and cotton buds. The only exceptions to the new rule will be for people with a medical need or disability, for whom plastic straws and other materials will be available upon request.

(Fiona Harvey. www.theguardian.com, 22.05.2019. Adaptado.

Leia o texto para responder a questão.

Plastic straws, cotton buds and drink stirrers to be banned in England

    Plastic straws and drink stirrers, and cotton buds with plastic stems will be banned from sale and use in England from next April, the government has confirmed. The move, which has been in the offing for more than a year, is hoped to vastly reduce the litter and other environmental impacts of the nearly 5 billion plastic straws currently used each year in England, along with more than 300 million plastic stirrers and close to 2 billion cotton buds with plastic stems.

    Huge numbers of these items, particularly cotton buds, are flushed down toilets or otherwise end up in litter – surveys have recently found waterways across the UK full of plastic, putting wildlife at risk.

    Alternatives are available, including serving drinks without straws or stirrers, which is preferable, or using paper straws and biodegradable products in place of plastic stirrers and cotton buds. The only exceptions to the new rule will be for people with a medical need or disability, for whom plastic straws and other materials will be available upon request.

(Fiona Harvey. www.theguardian.com, 22.05.2019. Adaptado.