美语听力讲解:北美自贸协定重启谈判

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Especially if you've been watching for a while, you've heard us talk a lot about the civil war in Syria. But it's not the only Middle Eastern nation struggling with the consequences of war. A conflict in Yemen, which is located between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, started in 2015.
Forces who are loyal to the country's president had been fighting the rebels who drove him out of the country. Thousands have been killed in the conflict, tens of thousands have been wounded and the World Health Organization now says there have been half a million cases of suspected cholera.
It's an intestinal infection caused by bacteria. It spreads through contaminated water and food that comes in contact with it. Because millions in Yemen don't have access to clean water and because garbage collection has stopped in major Yemeni cities, health officials believe cholera is infecting as many as 5,000 people per day. The spread has slowed down over the past month and people who contract the disease are all but certain to survive if they get health care.
What's worsening the problem in Yemen and contributing to the fact that almost 2,000 people have died from te nation's cholera outbreak, is a widespread shortage of medicine, hospitals and health care workers to help.

Leaders from the U.S., Canada and Mexico huddled in Washington, D.C. yesterday. It was the official beginning of an effort to renegotiate NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. This is a trade deal between the three countries. It went into effect in 1994. Renegotiating NAFTA is something that Donald Trump promised to do while he was campaigning to become U.S. president.
A Mexican government official said the goal is to make the agreement work better. A Canadian official said her country wants to protect NAFTA's record of creating jobs and economic growth. A U.S. official said that while NAFTA has benefitted many Americans such as farmers, it's failed for countless others with at least 700,000 American jobs lost because of NAFTA.
All this gives an indication of the deal's mixed results.