The Notre Dame (巴黎圣母院) Fire

It feels as though the very heart of France and the soul of Europe have been broken. The fire of Notre Dame in Paris     1     Monday evening was an act of blind and terrible destruction,     2     (cause) great emotional pains to us all. We all share France’s terrible loss.

The fire struck     3     (quick) and uncontrollably. It gathered force with huge power. Much of the roof and the central building caught fire. After     4     hour or so, the Paris firefighters were able     5     (get) part of the fire under some degree of control and to protect other     6     (part) of the building that may survive. As night     7     (fall), the great west towers still stood against the sky, proud but hurt.

The Notre Dame is the symbol of the French capital and of France itself. It is world famous not simply as a Parisian building but through the     8     (write) of Victor Hugo,     9     made the building itself come alive in his novel Hunchback of Notre Dame.

We believe the Dame will rise again in time. This terrible fire is not an event that should     10     (forget) or quickly ignored. We stand with France in its hour of heartbreak. We will never, ever, turn away.

5 . Miep Gies, the woman who hid the Dutch girl Anne Frank’s diary from the Nazis to become one of the world’s most-read books, died after a brief illness at the age of 100.

It was Gies who guarded Anne’s diary, and presented it to the girl’s father, Otto, when he returned from the Auschwitz concentration camp(奥斯威辛集中营) at the end of World War Ⅱ—the only one of his family to survive.

In her diary, Anne Frank wrote about her teenage life hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944, when the Nazi police discovered her and her family’s hiding place. The diary, first published in 1947, has been translated into 70 languages.

Anne Frank expressed a great wish to live on after her death. Miep Gies saw it as her duty to help in making this happen.

Born in Vienna in 1909, Gies moved to the Netherlands at the age of 11. In 1933, she began working for Otto Frank at his trading company. At great risk to her own safety, she and four other helpers brought food and supplies to the Frank family hiding in a secret office building for more than two years.

When she turned 100, Gies tried to play down her own role. “I’m not a hero,” she said. “It wasn’t something I planned in advance. I simply did what I could to help.”

Every day she received letters from all over the world with questions about her relationship with Anne Frank and her role as a helper. Gies received many honors for her role, including from the Netherlands, Germany and Israel.

6 . A woman from Australia has found the world’s oldest known message in a bottle nearly 132 years after it was cast into the sea.

Tonya Illman discovered the drift (漂流) bottle half-buried in the sand on a beach in Western Australia, 180 kilometers north of the state capital Perth.

The message, dated 12 June 1886, was thrown into the Indian Ocean from the German ship Paula, which was en route from Cardiff, Wales, to its destination of Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). The bottle was one of the thousands thrown into oceans as part of a 69-year-long German experiment on global currents (洋流) to find faster shipping routes.

Until now, the previous world record for the oldest message in a bottle was 108 years, 4 months and 18 days from the time it was cast until its discovery.

Illman found the bottle near her son’s car in the beach’s soft sand.

“I was walking across when I saw something sticking out of the sand, so I went to take a closer look,” Illman was quoted as saying.

“It just looked like a lovely old bottle, so I picked it up thinking it might look good in my bookcase. My son’s girlfriend was the one who discovered the note when she went to tip the sand out.

“The note was damp, rolled tightly and tied with a string. We took it home and dried it out, and when we opened it, we saw it was in German, with very faint German handwriting on it.”

The Illmans took their find to the local museum which established that the bottle was a 19th Century Dutch gin bottle, and the German ship Paula sailed from Cardiff to Makassar (Indonesia) in 1886.