CNN news 2013-03-27 加文本

cnn news 2013-03-27

Hi, I'm Carl Azuz, and this is cnn Student News, we're going to start this new week with some signs of spring. Including two annual religious observances, yesterday was Palm Sunday, it was the first one for Pope Francis since he became the head of the Roman Catholic Church. You can see him here taking part of the Palm Sunday service in Vatican City.

For Christians, Palm Sunday is the start of the Holy Week, which concludes next Sunday on Easter. The observance commemorates Jesus Christ's arrival in Jerusalem, when palm leaves were laid out in front of it. And some churches, the palm that are used on Palm Sunday are saved and burned into ashes for Ash Wednesday. The other religious observance starts tonight, it's the first night of Passover, a Jewish holiday that celebrates when the Israelites escaped from slavery in Egypt.

Passover is also called Pesach, the name comes from the story in the Bible about ten plagues. During one, God killed Egyption's first born sons but passed over the houses of Israelites. According to the story, when the Jews fled from Egypt, they didn't have time for their bread to rise. So during the weeklong Passover holiday, Jewish people only eat unleavened bread called matzah.

One thing you don't expect to see in Spring is this. It doesn't look like the weather is paying much attention to the calendar. Eight states were under a winter storm warning yesterday. The National Weather Service predicted seven to ten inches of snow from Missouri all the way to Ohio, so much for Spring. Storms started out in the Rockies and it's been making its way east. There was a World Cup qualifying match in Colorado on Friday, look at that. You don't see soccer played in that kind of weather very often.

There was something else that happened this weekend. A worldwide event that was just lights out.

Lights out, in Paris, lights out, in London, lights out on landmarks all around the globe. Earth hour was this past Saturday, when it hit 8:30 local time, people flipped the switch to go dark for 60 minutes. Organizers started the idea to raise awareness about climate change. The estimate millions of people and more than 150 countries got invloved in this.