篇一：有关于一些新闻的英语报道
Organic food: no better for you, or the planet
For organic farmers, bad news comes in twos this week. Organic crops seem to be no more nutritious than conventional ones, and are not necessarily great for the planet either.
Organic farming eschews synthetic pesticides and fertilisers, and . of Stanford University in California and colleagues put together 237 studies comparing organic and non-organic food. They found little evidence that organic food was more nutritious. Conventional foods contained more pesticides but were within permitted limits (). Meanwhile, have been questioned by Hanna Tuomisto of the University of Oxford and colleagues, who reviewed 109 papers. Organic farms were less polluting for a given area of land, but were often more polluting per unit of food produced. They did have better soil, though, and housed more species (Journal of Environmental Management, ).
"An 'organic' label is not a straightforward guarantee of the most environmentally friendly product,says Tuomisto. She advocates integrated farming, combining a range of
existing systems.
"Advanced breeding technologies, combined with the best farming practices from organic and conventional systems, could have the best overall impact in terms of improving crop yield and sustainability,says , director of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK
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o Janine di Giovanni in Daraya
o , Friday 7 September 2012 18.31 BST
A mass grave in Daraya. Estimates of the death tally in August's massacre range from several hundred to more than 1,000. Photograph: Shaam News Network/AP
The young mechanic had lost the sight in his right eye during the battle of Daraya. Still, he searched for his missing father for three days, combing destroyed buildings and piles of rubble. He finally found the old man dead on the outskirts of town, at a farm with three other bodies, boys aged 16-20. "Why kill an old man?he asks. He is not the only one to ask the question. An estimated 500
people were slaughtered in Daraya over two and a half days at the end of last month. Rebels and the government accuse each other. Left behind is a town destroyed beyond recognition.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has interviewed Daraya residents and analysed satellite images of the battle, evidence points towards government responsibility for the killings, although it is not clear whether uniformed men or the shabiha militia carried out the killings after the town was bombed by helicopters and shelled.
新闻报道作文"What we don't know yet is who did the dirty work, the executions –whether it was men in uniform or shabiha,says HRW's Ole Solvang. "We're still investigating." Witnesses speak of intense shelling from helicopters with mounted machine guns, mortars from a government military airport near the Mezzah neighbourhood, and snipers in buildings in the north of the city. They speak of bodies lying in the street, and groups of civilians hiding underground only to be found and summarily killed.
Shortly after the events, in an extraordinary act of indecency, the pro-regime television journalist Micheline Azar, entered the town to interview the dying, sticking her microphone in front of their bloody and wounded faces. She said the killings were "in the name of freedom". Not even children were spared her intrusions.
"It was horrific,says Reem, a Daraya resident. "She was a vulture. She went through the crowds talking to the wounded as though she was floating on water, as though there was not this scene of hell in front of her."
Ghost town
Two weeks on, Daraya still stinks of death. A poor Sunni suburb south of Damascus, it had been well known for furniture-making, and for its peaceful resistance before the conflict. Now it is a ghost town of shattered glass and broken graveyard walls, bombed vegetable shops and decapitated blocks of flats. Rank rubbish is piled on corners, uncollected. There is the unmistakable smell of rotting corpses that have not yet been removed from houses. A lone bicyclist makes his way awkwardly through the rubble and debris.  The town is still and lifeless. There is no way to confirm the death tally. It ranges from opposition reports of more than 1,000 to government figures of several hundred. The local gravedigger says he has already buried 1,000, and more bodies are found eve
ry day. The mounds of freshly dug, moist earth in the cemetery in the middle of town look like they harbour at least several hundred dead.
A woman who comes to the graveyard each day to check a list for news of her sons says: "We are still searching houses and
abandoned ruins trying to find them.She says everyone waits for the hour when the gravedigger arrives and there are new bodies to identify.
In the ashen aftermath of war, it is impossible to imagine what this place looked like before, or what really happened here. It was first bombed, the centre flattened, before house-to-house operations were conducted. Some witnesses say men and boys were killed at close range with guns; others say knives were used.
"The problem is there is no food, no water, no electricity,says one family. Outside, two children play amid the rubble. "There's nothing to do, no one to play with,"
says six-year-old Rauda. "My friends left when the bombing started. I stayed close to my mother and held her. But she said we were not leaving."
Many fear becoming refugees as much as they fear the violence. "Would you leave your home?asks Rashid, who owned a shop, now destroyed. "Would you take your life apart? We leave with our heads high, or we don't leave at all."
The attack on Daraya started on 20 August and intensified two days later. The Free Syrian Army withdrew from the town on 23 August and the army entered the next day. "The shelling