1006G SPECTACULAR 备考日记 by tequilawine [无]--最初的梦想绝对会到达

tequilawineUID：2702008

European holidays [Rebuttal]
This house believes that Europeans would be better off with fewer holidays and higher incomes

The moderator's rebuttal remarks
Dec 24th 2009 | John O'Sullivan

Those with a wryadj. 扭歪的, 歪斜的, 歪曲的 disposition will find some amusement in two American-based commentators spending Christmas locked in a debate over whether Europeans take too much holiday. It reminds the moderator of the title of a paper co-authored by one of the featured guests in our debate: "The Economics of Workaholism: We Should Not Have Worked on This Paper". Thankfully, neither of our two debaters sees the holiday season as an excuse for slackingn. 松弛; 淡季; 静止#煤屑, 煤末#峡谷; 沼泽; 凹地v. 使松弛; 马虎从事; 使缓慢; 松懈; 松驰; 减弱adj. 松弛的; 疏忽的; 不流畅的adv. 马虎地; 缓慢地, even if one is arguing for more time off.

Mr Gordon spares no effort不遗余力 尽力去做 in trying to demolishv. 毁坏, 破坏; 推翻, 打败; 拆除; 驳倒
objections to the proposal that Europe takes too much time off. Are Europeans healthier and happier because of their long holidays, as his opponent argues? The evidence suggests no such link, says Mr Gordon. The variation in life expectancy within the EU itself is unrelated to holiday time. Europe's health and vitality in comparison with America are explained by good diet, not vacation time. Look at Japan. Its workers also take few holidays, yet they are far healthier than Americans. That is because "the Japanese are thin and eat a lot of fish [while] Americans are fat and eat a lot of burgers and pizza".

Similarly Mr Gordon sees no connection between holidays and life satisfaction in the EU. Danes have long holidays but score badly in cross-country studies of happiness, he notes. The Portuguese, by contrast, have short holidays but are fairly chipper. And Americans are cheerier than Europeans, despite their briefer vacations. Mr Gordon is keen (and perhaps wise) not to make this debate about whether Europeans have a better quality of life than Americans do. "We have many policies and institutions that should be copied from Europe," he says. "But long vacations are not among them."

For his part, Mr de Graaf strives hard to bulldozev. 恫吓; 以推土机清除; 欺凌 Mr Gordon's case. The idea that Europeans suffer by sacrificing income for holiday time is "simplistic". Money isn't everything and it is not much use if you have no time off to enjoy it, whether it comes as private income or is used to finance the public works and generous welfare benefits enjoyed in many European countries. America may be rich, he notes, but its wider dispersionn. 分散; 散布; 传播; 消散
of wealth and income means many Americans do not share in its benefits. The poorest citizens often have the least time off, another inequality.

Europe closing down for August may be a cause for regret, says Mr de Graaf, but that is hardly an argument against a generous holiday entitlementn. 应得的权利; 津贴. Perhaps Europeans should take more piecemeal breaks, as Americans are forced to. To close out his case, Mr de Graaf returns to his strongest debating point (even if it is based on anecdote rather than evidence): "I have never found a European who would trade his vacation time with the typical American, but it's hard to find an American who does not envy his European counterpart in this regard."

Have our contestants' efforts convinced you one way or the other? Please cast your vote now.

The proposer's rebuttal remarks
Dec 24th 2009 | Robert J. Gordon

John de Graaf's defence of Europe's long vacations centres on health and happiness. He credits long vacations as the source both of better health outcomes and a higher level of happiness in Europe than in America. But he is wrong on both counts. Europeans do live longer than Americans, but not because of their long vacations. And Europeans are demonstrably less happy than Americans.

Further, a wide variety of new evidence in the economics literature on happiness shows a broad range in western Europe, with the United States comparable with the top European countries and way above the western European average. Some Europeans, especially in southern Europe, are downright miserable.

Fortunately we do not have to limit this debate to our opinions, because there are facts available on the length of vacations, on life expectancy and on happiness.

Mercer Human Resources Consulting maintains a league table of minimum paid vacation days for a worker with a ten-year tenure, and this table includes paid holidays as well. Surprisingly, these vary more across the EU-15 countries than between the EU-15 and the United States. The common notion is that Europeans have five weeks of vacation, more than double the stingy adj. 吝啬的, 缺乏的 two weeks granted to Americans. But the Mercer table shows much smaller differences: 23.3 days of holiday for the population-weighted EU-15 compared with 15 for Americans, a margin of +55%. Including paid vacation days narrows the margin to 33.7 days for Europe compared with 25 for Americans, a margin of +35%.

Are these data on holidays related to health outcomes, as Mr de Graaf contends? Fifty years ago life expectancy in western Europe and Japan was shorter than in the United States but now is longer. The Wikipedia league table based on UN data shows that every country in western Europe except Portugal has a longer life expectancy at birth than the United States, with differences ranging from an extra 2.7 years in Spain and Sweden to an extra 1.2 years in Belgium, Germany and the UK.

But these intra-Europe differences in life expectancy are not correlated with vacation time. The correlation across the 15 countries between days of vacation and life expectancy is only 0.13, far below the correlation required for statistical significance. Adding Japan pushes the correlation coefficient down to -0.08. In fact, since Japan has shorter vacations and much longer life expectancy than the EU-15 average, the correlation for the EU-15 average and Japan is a stark -1.0.

This suggests the strong possibility that vacation time has nothing to do with health outcomes in general and life expectancy in particular. The Japanese are thin and eat a lot of fish. Americans are fat and eat a lot of burgers and pizza, and their restaurants serve portions that are grotesquelyadv. 奇异地; 荒诞地 oversized to the eyes of European and Japanese visitors. An epidemic of obesity starting in childhood is widely recognised as an important source of America's poor performance in the league table of life expectancy, as is poor access to health care. I would be the first to support the European view that America's health-care system is unfair, inefficient, needlessly complex, and deprives millions of Americans of the health care that in other developed nations is regarded as a fundamental right of citizenship. But this debate is about vacations, not the American health-care system.点名讨论范围。

Let us turn now to happiness, for which extensive cross-country data are available thanks to extensive research admirably summarised recently by David Blanchflower1, an impartial adj. 公平的，不偏不倚的observer who holds both American and British citizenship. Indexes of happiness for particular countries are developed from surveys that ask large numbers of people about the degree to which they are satisfied with their lives. The basic metric is a "four-step" question which asks respondents if they are very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied and not at all satisfied with their lives. If everyone responded "very satisfied", that country would have a happiness index of 4.0, and if everyone responded "fairly satisfied" the index would be 3.0.

Results from the 2004 survey (the latest available for all countries) show the United States with a happiness index of 3.42 and the population-weighted average for the EU-15 at 3.04 and Japan at a dismal adj. 阴沉的，凄凉的，暗的2.74. Within the EU-15 the indexes range from a high of 3.59 in Denmark to a low of 2.49 for the Portuguese, who seem to regard their lives as even more dismal than do the Japanese.

Are Danes happy because they take unusually long vacations, and are Portuguese unhappy because their vacations are short? Once again, there is no correlation within the EU-15. The correlation coefficient between happiness and days of vacation is a highly insignificant 0.05 and drops to -0.10 when paid holidays are included.

What about the relationship between happiness and vacation days between the EU-15 average, Japan and the United States? Here the correlation is strongly negative, a highly significant -0.65 for vacation days and an amazing -0.94 when paid holidays are included.

But I would not try to trump Mr de Graaf by claiming that Americans are happier because they take short holidays. It is much more likely that the length of holidays has nothing to do with happiness. There are more plausible candidates. Start from the fact that American dwelling units have twice the interior space as in Europe with four times the total land per housing unit. Americans happily do their errands in SUVs while Europeans are carrying their groceries home via bus or subway to their cramped apartments. Mr De Graaf envies European holidays for "improving family life and the welfare of children". Another interpretation is that European children need those extra vacation days to escape from the confinement of their space-constrained residences, while American children can play outside with their friends while Daddy fires up the backyard barbecue.

All is not well in America, and there are problems beyond obesity and a dysfunctional health-care system. American fiscal deficits are too high, petrol taxes are too low and the United States uses about twice as much energy as Europe. We have many policies and institutions that should be copied from Europe, but long vacations are not among them.

The opposition's rebuttal remarks
Dec 24th 2009 | John de Graaf

I am honoured to share this debate with Robert Gordon, many of whose analyses I have admired for their nuance and depth. I agree with him that we should define Europe as the pre-2004 EU-15. But his opening remarks strike me as simplistic.adj. 过分单纯化的

It seems from what content in Professor Gordon's opening statement actually refers to holiday time (I share his feeling that Europeans probably retire too early), that his position rests on the opinion that Europeans are nearly as productive per hour as Americans, yet "so poor" by comparison. What can he mean by this, except that in aggregate GDP terms, Europeans have less money? If money were the measure of the good life, he might have a case, but that would be to ignore things which Europeans take for granted but many Americans have no access to: efficient public transportation, including high-speed rail, generous family and sick-leave benefits, free health care and public education through college, a generous social safety net, and, of course, the time to enjoy these things.

To accept his view that Europeans are poor would mean to discount their better health, longer lives and lower levels of mental illness. It would mean that wealth is defined as more massive homes or cars or entertainment systems, in which to appreciate a purely private comfort. The Europeans need less of these things because they have ample and beautiful public spaces, cities of charm and grace, paths to walk and ride their bikes, highly accessible art and culture—and the time to enjoy these things.

European life is hardly grim, bleak or desperate. I think of the rural Dutch village where my cousins live, with its international restaurants, lively, colourful market and prosperous-looking shops, or the dozens of tiny, lovely and well-kept Austrian, Swiss and German hamlets小村; 部落 one passes on the train, each house with its bright flowerbox, each town surrounded not by Wal-Mart sprawl—the mark of buying power—but by the lovely greenery of field and forest. And I compare them with the derelictionn. 废弃，放弃，玩忽职守 that characterises so much of rural America—the heartland streets with their broken windows and empty storefronts and homes—or with the urban slums one sees from Amtrak.

If Americans are richer than Europeans in income, we also have to consider who shares in that wealth. For the half of all Americans our 30-year march to extreme inequality has left in the lurchn. 突然倾斜; 蹒跚, 踉跄; 摇晃#惨败, 挫折, 倾斜v. 突然倾斜; 蹒跚, 东倒西歪地向前, even the material lives of Europeans look very good indeed.

Europeans, professor Gordon suggests, suffer from a "tedium of family life". That seems a harsh assessment of a life where families enjoy their flowers and gardens, long meals together, shopping together, bike rides and amusements together, while their American counterparts rush through their meals, flop, exhausted by work, in front of the television in their separate rooms and starve for the conversation of a French café or British pub. I am reminded of what a state legislator, a Republican actually, told me of a trip to Scandinavia. "It was as you say, John. The work ended at five, people had plenty of time off, and we had such great long meals and walks in the woods and wonderful talks." "And you know," she said, her eyes gleaming, "the best part about it was that everyone wasn't trying to get filthyadj. 污秽的，丑恶的 rich!"

Professor Gordon's descriptions of dull European and exciting American vacations are the work of a lively imagination. My French cousins take two to three weeks off in August, another two at the Christmas holidays and shorter breaks in fall and spring. My Dutch cousins do the same. They often camp, not in "pitiful" trailer camps, but in well-tended European campgrounds that are inexpensive, yet commonly include excellent on-site restaurants.

If too many Europeans take their vacations at the same time, as Professor Gordon suggests, that is an argument for spreading those holidays out, not for eliminating them. And if their resorts are crowded, well, so is much of Europe; its population densities have always been higher than in the United States, where open space is plentiful. But how that can be seen as an argument against holidays is beyond me.

It is up to you, dear reader, to decide if the fact that some Europeans have adult children at home is relevant to holiday time. If we lopped a couple of weeks off, would they all be out of the house?

What strikes me as a real fantasy game is Professor Gordon's idea that Americans regularly have weeks of time here and there to visit the beach, stay with relatives and ski the Rockies. A 2008 poll by the Opinion Research Corporation found that the median American paid vacation was one week, with more than a quarter of American workers getting none at all. I met a woman in Florida who was supposed to get two weeks of paid vacation a year but had not been allowed to take it in seven years.

Instead of stretching their long weekends into weeklong vacations, many Americans chop their vacation days so they have the occasional long weekend, or use them to make up for their lack of paid sick days. And as for those easily accessible American playgrounds, Aspen brims with European skiers and when I was last in Yosemite, the Americans were lamenting that most of the visitors there were from Europe.

In a nutshell简单地简约地, as Professor Gordon puts it, I have never found a European who would trade his vacation time with the typical American, but it is hard to find an American who does not envy his European counterpart in this regard.

So, for Professor Gordon, it seems that the case against long holidays is built on the fact that Americans (at least the rich ones) have more money than Europeans do. But to be rich in time and relationships, health, public life, security, access to art, beauty and conversation, is hardly to be poor.

And if an American economist like Professor Gordon has not yet figured this out, the Europeans, led, ironically, by President Sarkozy, are starting to.

原文链接：http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/440

tequilawineUID：2702008

To comment this essay, i have to say i can not agree with the opposition's opinion anymore.  Cause the guy just punch the moderator fatal fundation of his whole argument. And just resting on this point, it already enable to persuade us to believe what the guy said in assisting his assertion that the long vocation does ensue with series of advantageous outcomes. As Mr. Gorden spare no effort to demolish objections to the proposal that Europe take too much time off, however, he failed to support his opinion just basing on the database coming from no where.

tequilawineUID：2702008

Doing Good Badly
By NANCY GIBBS
Cynicism is among our most punctual准时的, 严守时间的, 按期的 instincts. Within days of the earthquake in Haiti, there came warnings of impending compassion fatigue捐赠疲软, wagers赌博; 赌注; 赌金 of how long it would be before we turned away to the Super Bowl, the Olympics and the Oscars, leaving Haiti to misery.

But I don't believe people get tired of helping--only that they get tired of feeling helpless. The challenge arises when we witness what health crusader十字军战士, 改革者 Paul Farmer calls "stupid deaths": death in childbirth, death by mosquito蚊虫, 蚊, death, in the case of Haiti, from infections that spread when crushed limbs aren't amputated v. 切断; 截; 锯掉; 删除 fast enough. Help never arrives fast enough because no two disasters are alike and chaos is an agile enemy. So I wondered how we would feel, after texting our $10 donations to the Red Cross and writing checks to Save the Children, still coming home night after night to the growing mass grave on our flat-screens.

Epic叙事诗, 史诗 disasters inspire dreams of glory. "Everyone wants to be a hero. Everyone wants to help," Dr. Thomas Kirsch, a co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Refugee and Disaster Response, told MSNBC. "It's not the way to do it." A team from his school arrived in Haiti so unprepared, its members needed rescue themselves. "They had no bedding, supplies or food," he said, and they had to rely on other relief agencies for support.

Desperation deforms v. 使残缺, 使变形; 变畸形; 变形 judgment, and not just among victims. Thus we meet missionary Laura Silsby and her flock, who in the face of so much suffering set out from Boise, Idaho, with a trailer full of children's clothes and a vow to help Haiti's orphans "find healing, hope, joy and new life in Christ." "Our hearts were in the right place," she insisted, but her head was somewhere else entirely, and they all wound up in jail. We know a bit more now about her regard for the niceties of law and protocol礼仪, 礼节(条约等的)草案; 草约: unpaid debts, civil lawsuits, a house in foreclosure and an improvised mission to scoop up铲起, 舀起 a load of children and head to the border without so much as a license or even confirmation that they were all orphans.

We also know that the families she encountered were desperate to survive. Parents were told their children would be cared for and schooled in the Dominican Republic; the families could even visit. "If someone offers to take my children to a paradise," a mother told the New York Times, "am I supposed to say no?" Silsby was warned by local officials about obtaining proper papers, and by that mark alone, her behavior was criminal. But it was also criminally naive.

One's duty in the face of disaster is not just to be kind but to be sensible. When a soldier, however brave, runs into enemy fire without a plan or shield, his death isn't just a loss; it's a waste. The same is true of all those who want to help but wind up造成 卷起; 上紧...发条; 卷拢
getting in the way, a distraction neither the victims nor the professionals can afford. Chances are that if the 82nd Airborne can't get food to the tent city fast enough, your food bank can't either. On its website, Samaritan's Purse asks aspiring volunteers to "please be patient and we will get back to you."

Then there is the help that is no help at all. After the 2004 tsunami n. 海啸, 地震海啸, aid poured in from all over the world. But it included tons of outdated or unneeded medicines that Indonesian officials had to throw out. People sent Viagra and Santa suits, high-heeled shoes and evening gowns. A year later, after an earthquake in Pakistan, so much unusable clothing arrived that people burned it to stay warm. It may make us feel good to put together children's care packages with cards and teddy bears--but whose needs are we trying to meet?

Money is fleet and nimble灵活的, 敏捷的, 灵敏的. The very thing that makes it unsatisfying to give makes it powerful to deploy调度, 使用. It can turn into anything--a water bottle, a prefab house, a tetanus shot, a biscuit. It lets relief agencies buy locally whenever possible, supporting local markets for products that are culturally and environmentally right. In the past decade, accountability has become a watchword of relief agencies around the world, with new guidelines to help donors know that their aid won't be wasted. Give money, Presidents Bush and Clinton implore, and by implication, leave the rest to professionals.

If you can't feed a hundred people, Mother Teresa used to say, then feed just one. There are slow-motion disasters everywhere. The Red Cross is doing heroic work in Haiti, but it is also doing it around the corner, when a house burns down. It may not feel glorious, but often the greatest good is accomplished quietly, invisibly. The choice is not either-or. We can give globally and help locally. Either way, the same principle holds in helping as in healing: First, do no harm.

comment:
i mean what could i say about that? author has told us so clearly. nowadays, people are obligation to donate on surface i mean, from the heart of soul, i doubt it would be elusive deciding whether to do this or not. From the hypothesis, easily we can go down to the phenomenon that people just give so much things that are not helpful at all, sometimes even harmful.  Yes there is the help that is no help at all. Possibly another plausible reason also make sense. As you are really ardent, even can not wait for pouring the miserable place to give your hand, you should contemplate thoroughly before seting out you plan, and make sure your help convert into winding up getting in the way, a distraction neither the victoms and professionals can afford.

so in conclusion, just make it easy and efficent, the very thing make it unsatisfying to give are money. They are esay to deploy and more free for the users, despite the unwillingness of some guys.
原文地址：http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1963749-2,00.html

plukaUID：2721764

哇~~考完了还来补作业，好精神~

tequilawineUID：2702008

Tree and leaf

The study of living things may shed light on urban planning. And vice versa

Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Alamy

CITIES are often described as being alive. A nice metaphor, but does it mean anything? And, if it does, can town planners and biologists learn from one another? Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University, wrote last year that Manhattan and a mouse might just be variations on a single structural theme. His point was that both are, in part, composed of networks for transporting stuff from one place to another. Roads, railways, water and gas mains, sewage1.污物, 垃圾; 污水2下水道(系统)pipes and electricity cables all move things around. So do the blood vessels of animals and the sap-carrying xylem and phloem of plants. How far can the analogy be pushed?

Peter Dodds of the University of Vermont draws a particular analogy between the blood system and a suburban railway network. The commuter-rail system of a city ramifiesv. 分枝; 纵横交错; 分派from the centre. The farther out you go, the sparser稀疏的
it is. By analogy, Dr Dodds predicted, the network of capillaries (the tiny blood vessels that permeate tissues) would not be as dense in large animals (where many of them are far from the centre) as it is in small ones. They, too, branch ultimately from a central source—the heart. Surprisingly, no one had looked for this before, but in a paper published recently in Physical Review Letters Dr Dodds shows that this does indeed turn out to be the case.

Dr Dodds’s calculations overthrow a 70-year-old rule of thumb大拇指规则 which is known as the ¾ law of metabolismn.  【生】新陈代谢, 代谢作用. This suggests energy expenditure费用; 经费; 开支 is proportional to body mass raised to the power of three-quarters. That a mouse expends more energy per gram than an elephant does is well known. But Dr Dodds’s calculations show that metabolic rates must fall off faster than had previously been believed as animals get bigger because less glucose than thought is being transported by the smaller than predicted capillary network. The law needs to be adjusted to something more like two-thirds.

Two other studies published in the same volume similarly overthrow conventional wisdom about plants. Traditionally, biologists have celebrated the trunk, branch and twig system of a tree as no accident. Many mathematical formulas have suggested it is the best, least wasteful way to design a distribution network. But the very end of such a network, the leaf, has a different architecture. Unlike the xylem and phloem, the veins in a leaf cross-link and loop(线、带等绕成的)圈, 环, 线圈. Francis Corson of Rockefeller University in New York used computer models to examine why these loops exist.

From an evolutionary point of view, loops seem inefficient because of the redundancy inherent in a looped network. Dr Corson’s models show, however, that this inefficiency is true only if demand for water and the nutrients it contains is constant. By studying fluctuations in demand he discovered one purpose of the loops: they allow for a more nuanced delivery system. Flows can be rerouted through the network in response to local pressures in the environment, such as different evaporation rates in different parts of a leaf.

Another group of researchers at Rockefeller, led by Marcelo Magnasco, also examined vein-loops in leaves. They found that as well as improving efficiency, they also help to ameliorate v. 改善, 变好, 改良damage. They discovered this by injecting
fluorescent dye荧光染料 into leaves to see if the vein network could distribute the dye to all parts of a leaf that had been damaged. They found the loops are structured in such a way that no matter which piece of a leaf’s supply mechanism is disrupted, there is usually enough capacity in the rest to distribute water and nutrients. “It was very surprising,” Dr Magnasco observes. “The famous theoremsn. 定理, 法则that tell us that the optimal structure is a tree failed in a spectacular fashion.”

The leaf, then, is a resilient distribution network—one whose principles could be applied to, say, electricity grids. Next time your power is cut off because a tree has fallen on the cable, remember that.

http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15495944&source=hptextfeature


comment:
actually, i don't know how to argue about this prose. because you know it is just a illustration of comparison between mammals or plants and city planning. the new concept introduced in the passage just inspire us to give more contemplation on these things that are totally far from each other. you know actually sometimes we seems extremely focus on what we major in and leave other domains behind, in other words, generalization in most parts of fields are much more important to the special field studying than what  we can imagine. So next time, don't forget pin on some other stuff, even the things may disgust you. Who knows what will you get from it?

tequilawineUID：2702008

sometimes you just thought you will never get through this, and all of your hopes will explode ultimately, however, once swallowing your tooth blending with your blood, you go through this and bear it, you will eventually know what you really get, no matter if the destination you get are the original one you want. so pleadng yourself instead of anyone else, to be strong, tough, and hardheaded sometimes. maybe the empyreal view are just at the corner of the curves of roads.

tequilawineUID：2702008

Pillar of wisdom

Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Getty Images

The Rule of Law. By Tom Bingham. Allen Lane; 213 pages; £20. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

TOM BINGHAM holds that what has come to be known as the rule of law is “the nearest we are likely to approach to a universal secular现世的, 尘世的; 世俗的; 非宗教的 religion”. The key word is “universal”. Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer, once described the National Health Service (NHS) as being similarly important to the British, but as Barack Obama’s attempts to reform America’s health-care system demonstrate, the NHS is not the envy of the world. For most people who live under the rule of law its blessings can be clearer and less ambiguous even than those conferred by liberal democracy or free markets.

Uniquely, Lord Bingham has held all three of Britain’s great judicial offices: Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord until his retirement in 2008. In recent times no British jurist n. 法学家, 法律着作家, 法理学者other than Lord Denning has wielded 支配, 行使more influence on the development of the law. In this short but important book, Lord Bingham begins by outlining the historical milestones (from the Magna Carta to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948) that have contributed to understanding what is meant by the rule of law and what he believes are eight essential principles that underpin加基础于...; 加强...的基础 it.

Among these are the accessibility of the law, equality before the law法律面前人人平等, the right to a fair trial公正审判, the legal accountability of servants of the state官吏 and so on. Most of Lord Bingham’s eight principles are uncontroversial, although some will feel that, in defining his preference for a “thick” over a “thin” definition of the rule of law, he goes too far by including social injustices, such as a right to education, which he feels “no one living in a free democratic society…should be required to forgo”.

However, it is when he gets to his final point, the requirement that states should regard their obligations under international law as no less forceful than those under national laws, that he really makes his mark出名成功. In a cool, but deadly dissection of the assault on the rule of law that was launched by the so-called “war on terror”, Lord Bingham deals first with the question of whether the allied invasion of Iraq was legal. He has no doubt that it was not. He argues persuasively that neither Security Council resolutions 678 nor 1441 could bear the weight that the British government was forced to place on them when confronted by the failure to obtain a further resolution explicitly authorising the use of force. One cannot help feeling that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith might have had a hotter time under examination by Lord Bingham than by the Chilcot panel.

His greatest concern is the way in which the threat of terrorism has been used to justify the encroachmentn. 侵蚀，侵犯
on civil liberties. Lord Bingham takes to task责备某人, 申斥某人governments both in Britain and abroad who subvert颠覆; 推翻; 暗中破坏 the rule of law in the name of security, using Orwellian euphemisms such as control orders (house arrest without trial), extraordinary rendition (kidnapping) and enhanced interrogation techniques (torture). And he quotes Benjamin Franklin with approval: “He who would put security before liberty deserves neither.”

Lord Bingham ends by asking what makes the difference between good and bad government. It is, of course, the rule of law. He concludes: “It remains an ideal, but an ideal worth striving for, in the interests of good government and peace, at home and in the world at large全面地, 详细地, 充分地, 无省略地.”

http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15495776&source=hptextfeature


comment:
we like to know that we are in good sense of the issue, cause i have experienced the topic in issue for several times, and some ideas from the passages just inspire me. moreover, it enable me to rethink about what is the marrow of law, in a deeper level?
as the author quoted, the rule of law is the nearest we are likely to approach to a universial secular religion. the main words in the sentence is universial, which means it reveal the foundation of law--the accessibility of law, equality before law, the right to a fair trial, the legal accountability of sevants of the state and so on.
this is the sanction that measures if the governments are good or bad.  it is of course, the rule of law. we can know that, it remains an ideal, but an ideal worth strving for, in the interests of good government and peace, at home and in the world at large.  

tequilawineUID：2702008

Mix message

Barack Obama’s advisers lay out some steps to a rebalanced economy. Others are out of his hands

Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Illustration by Jac Depczyk

FEW things have frustrated Washington’s punditocracyn. 权威统治集团
more than the search for “Obamanomics”, a consistent set of principles that underpins Barack Obama’s thinking on the American economy. “We can’t afford another so-called economic ‘expansion’ like the one from the last decade…where prosperity was built on a housing bubble and financial speculation,” Mr Obama declared in his state-of-the-union address last month. Well, OK. But what, then, should the next expansion be like? It usually falls to a president’s Council of Economic Advisers to drape悬挂, 装饰 his pronouncements in respectable economics. Mr Obama’s council attempts to do just that in its annual “Economic Report of the President”, released on February 11th.

In a nutshell简言之, 概括起来, 一言以蔽之, the report argues that it is not enough for the economy to start growing again. Rather, “the composition of spending needs to be reoriented再改方向, 再定方位; 再适应环境.” That means smaller roles for consumption and housing, and bigger roles for saving, investment and exports. The report elegantly reframes much of Mr Obama’s domestic agenda as microeconomic微观经济的 nudges in the direction of this overall macroeconomic宏观经济的, 总体经济的 rebalancing.

In the years leading up导致 to the crisis soaring asset prices, financial innovations and low unemployment all encouraged Americans to spend more and save less. Their saving as a share of disposable income税后所得 fell steadily from around 10% in the early 1980s to around 1%, while home-ownership rates and residential-construction activity both outran levels justified by demography alone. Wealth, credit availability and unemployment have all now reversed.

The report predicts consumption and home-building will be smaller shares of GDP while the personal-saving rate will stabilise v. (使) 稳定 at a higher equilibrium均衡, 均势, 相称, 平均 of between 4% and 7%. Mr Obama is pushing this process along by making retirement-saving plans more readily available and encouraging employers to increase employee contributions. The report does not say so, but the logical result of his financial reforms will be closer scrutiny of lending practices that will deprive marginal borrowers of credit.

In place of consumption and housing, the report says, business investment will expand. Investment since the 2001 recession has been “abnormally low”. Two forces will reverse that.

First, higher personal-saving rates and (more optimistically) a lower federal deficit will hold down long-term interest rates and the cost of capital. Second, the prospective return on investments will be buoyed by “promising technological developments”.

The administration thinks it can intensify the second force by funding more basic research. Private research and development (R&D) is hamstrung减弱...的活动能力 by uncertainty over the fate of an R&D tax credit, which at present must be renewed by Congress each year. Mr Obama proposes making it permanent. The backlogged积累(积压待办事项) Patent and Trademark Office can take up to four years to approve a patent application. Mr Obama has endorsed congressional plans to let it charge more to speed things up. The administration is telling federal agencies to track the results of the research they fund so that money is spent to maximum effect.

The report argues that as personal savings rise and the federal deficit declines, America’s appetite for foreign savings will shrink. The current-account deficit, which topped 6% of GDP in 2006, will narrow in the long run to between 1% and 2% of GDP, where it stood in the mid-1990s. Aiding this shift is a boost to exports that the report predicts will be a natural consequence as other countries, especially in Asia, rebalance their own economies towards greater consumption and investment.

In his state-of-the-union address Mr Obama called for a doubling of exports in five years. Achieving that is a stretch but the report nonetheless argues that the Export-Import Bank, which Mr Obama wants to increase its financing for smaller exporters, can help. More boldly, the report and Mr Obama’s speech suggest that the president has set aside his ambivalence about free trade and may soon take up stalled free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. The report also argues that a more progressive tax system, expanded health care and worker retraining are better ways to respond to the inevitable disruptions trade brings than protectionism. (Some of this is contrived: increased health-care coverage may well soften the sting of jobs lost to freer trade, but that is not why Mr Obama is pursuing it.)

The mercy of others

Laudable值得称赞的; 值得赞美的 as most of these microeconomic moves are, rebalancing depends crucially on two macroeconomic levers Mr Obama either cannot or will not touch: interest rates and the dollar. The council’s report frankly acknowledges that by draining national saving, the federal deficit, which will hit a record 10.6% of GDP this year, will hinder rebalancing. Yet it argues that tackling the deficit should wait until the “Federal Reserve…has the tools to counteract” the fallout. That will not be for a while yet. The report says that even with interest rates at zero, monetary policy remains “unusually tight” because negative rates would be more appropriate. Put less diplomatically, this means unless the Fed drags its feet on raising rates, fiscal contraction risks choking the economy. But that is a decision for the Fed, not Mr Obama.

A weaker dollar is also critical to rebalancing growth. Indeed, its decline to date correlates almost perfectly with the drop in the non-oil trade deficit since 2006, according to Martin Baily and Robert Lawrence, two economists at the Brookings Institution and Harvard University respectively. This is not, however, something America, as the world’s biggest debtor and the custodian of its reserve currency, can be seen to encourage. Nor is it solely America’s choice to make. The dollar is also captive to other countries’ exchange-rate policies and saving habits. As a result the “Economic Report of the President” is largely silent on the currency. Mr Obama seems to understand that the economy needs to rebalance. Whether it does may be out of his hands.

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/economicsfocus/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15497977&source=hptextfeature

comment:
so what is wrong with the pronouncement of US president Barack Obama? As we ponder in this essay, the marrow of the problems looms in front of us?
Our president draw a beautiful and magnificent mirage before us, nonetheless, he failed to lead us a way to attain it.

To put all of your eggs in one basket is much more riskful, you know i mean we just can ont entirly rely on the investment in stead of housing and consuming. Because the main basises bracketing investment seems not so solid and compelling. As we all know that, second motive maybe more easy to approach, however the first one seems a totally paradox. Elicited from the following passage, we know that the two levers rebalancing economy is either can not or will not be touchable for our little president.

tequilawineUID：2702008

Out from the ashes

Recent sales of contemporary art reveal a vibrant yet capricious rebound

Feb 17th 2010 | From The Economist online

The contemporary art business has bounced back faster than many expected, but the market still lacks the coherent drive of the boom.一句话点名主旨 Whereas evening sales in 2007 had the exhilaration of a Formula One race, last week's contemporary sales at Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips had a rambling不着边际的 (谈话), 漫无限制的, (思想等)散漫的 feel, as if bidders were driving cross country in a wide range of vehicles.

Sotheby's

Sotheby's kicked off the week with an evening sale on February 10th that brought in £54.1m ($84.5m), the second-highest total for a February contemporary auction and three times more than last year's paltry没有价值的; 微不足道的 £17.9m. Of the 79 lots on offer, more than half came from the highly credible but hithertoadv.  迄今; 到目前为止uncommercial collection of Gerhard and Anna Lenz, who have concentrated on a branch of apocalypticallyadj. 预示灾祸的，启示的 minimal art called “Zero”. The artworks, which Sotheby's catalogue associated with “a grey emptiness... a cultural cemetery墓地, 公墓 and a knowledge vacuum”, were not what you'd normally think of as surefireadj. 一定成功的 auction lots. Nevertheless, most of them were met with enthusiastic bidding and 19 works achieved record prices. Sotheby's European chairman of contemporary art, Cheyenne Westphal, explained that buyers “took great comfort in the time, care and consideration invested by Mr and Mrs Lenz in assembling such a coherent group.”

One historic lot was a rare set of three paintings by Roman Opalka, who has conceived想到； 想象
his oeuvre n. 全部作品 since 1965 as a single continuous work in which he paints white numbers in order from one to infinity on consecutive连续的， 依顺序的, mostly grey canvases; each new painting starts the numbers where he last left off (see slideshow below). The “1-∞” paintings were initially offered as three separate lots, but the artist intervened after hearing about the sale and requested they be sold as a triptych. The buyer of the Opalkas told The Economist that the “marriage value” of the three works was worth the £713,250 he paid. “Opalka is one of the great artists of the conceptual era,” he said. “Three consecutive paintings tell the story of the incredible beauty that comes out of this intense labour.”

A 1961 “Fire” painting by Yves Klein entitled “F 88”, which features voids in the shape of naked women, was the most expensive lot of the Lenz consignment, reaching £3.3m. It was bought by a Swiss collector sitting in the room, who also acquired Klein’s “MG 25” for £1.7m and Lucio Fontana's copper relief, “Concetto Spaziale, New York 26”, for £3.1m (see slideshow). Loic Gouzer, a contemporary art specialist at Sotheby's, enthused v. 热狂, 使热心, “Owning a Klein is like owning a fragment of another planet.”

No contemporary evening sale is complete these days without a Peter Doig. Sotheby's offered “Saint Anton (Flat Light)”, a large-scale snowy mountainscape, consigned by James Van Damme, who had acquired the painting from the Victoria Miro Gallery for £12,000 in 1996. The lot sold for £2.84m to an anonymous telephone bidder. When asked why he was selling, Mr Van Damme admitted that he was keen to buy a Trinidadian summer scene by the artist, adding that “Sotheby's did an amazing job convincing me to sell.” Many were surprised, including Mr Van Damme, when Mr Doig's “Concrete Cabin West Side” (see slideshow), from an earlier, more art-historically relevant series, sold for less—£2.1m—at Christie's the following night. Rumour has it that Roman Abramovich psyched out吓坏 装疯 逃避 the competition; no one wants to bid against him.

On February 11th Christie's sold 90% of their 51 lots, bringing in a total of £39.1m—a nice step up from the £8.4m raised in the equivalent 相等的, 相当的 sale last year. Lot 1 raised an eyebrow使别人人惊讶，引人侧目或不满or two: Matthew Day Jackson's 2007 depiction of Richard Buckminster Fuller in psychedelic glasses (see slideshow) soared over its high estimate of £40,000 to sell for £601,250 to Laurence Graff, a diamond dealer, sitting in the front row. Mr Graff had not heard of the young artist until he received Christie's catalogue, but he was “knocked out” when he saw the work up close. “I'm a jeweller. I know about execution and that painting is flawless,” said Mr Graff. “I didn't care what I paid.” Mr Graff went on to purchase a large red “Dollar Sign” painting by Andy Warhol and also the cover lot: Yves Klein's “Anthropométrie (ANT 5)”, a wood panel on which a woman's figure is outlined in the artist’s signature blue pigment, created as part of a series of six just before the artist's death at age 34 in 1962 (see slideshow).

Other triumphant lots included Klein's “Relief Eponge Or (RE 47II)”, which sold for £5.9m, the highest price of the week; Martin Kippenberger's “Fliegender Tanga (Flying Tanga)”, an early five-canvas extravaganza, which fetched vt. 取来，获得£2.6m, the second-highest price ever paid for the artist at auction; and Alighiero Boetti's “Onomino”, a red pen “Biro” work from 1973, which achieved a record £1m for Boetti. As Francis Outred, the director of Christie's postwar and contemporary art department in Europe, saw it, “We've seen growth in the market when we're supposed to have been in recession. The prices of European postwar artists are catching up with their American counterparts.”

Following these sales was one at Phillips de Pury & Company on Friday night. At the end of the week, one needs some entertainment, and Simon de Pury, a flamboyant艳丽的, 灿烂的 auctioneer with a rogue歹徒, 流氓 sense of humour, always accommodates. He hammered out £6.1m worth of art, mostly by younger artists selling for under £100,000. The top lots all sold for over £500,000—including two Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings, a Donald Judd wall sculpture, an exquisite精致的, 高雅的 little Gerhard Richter, “Abstrakes Bild”, and a fabulously adv. 难以置信地perverse George Condo painting called “Father and Son” (see slideshow). Back in 2008 Phillips was thought to be in a precarious financial state, and in 2009 the company weathered some shaky sales, so it was good to see a sell-through rate of 86% by lot, 92% by value. After the sale, Henry Allsopp, who went from being a private dealer to a senior specialist at Phillips just a month ago, said earnestly, “I think the market wants a third auction house—a cooler place where contemporary art is the core business.”

comment:

Yeah when times goes down for business, the best choice keeping the value of money is to buy some art works. But i wonder if all the works are equivalent to the price they were sold, in my sense, which i think some other factors just exaggerate the real value of the piece work. So let us focus on what we have experienced in the essay, what we got is that the bouncing back market really turns on our dealers faith in the future, but don't slide on the other tinny issue that market still lacks the coherent drive of boom, in a nutshell, the future is more bluring than what we expect.

tequilawineUID：2702008

Allawi triumphantIyad Allawi wins most seats in Iraq, but long wrangling口角, 争吵;  will decide who rules
WITH the count complete, Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Movement, known as Iraqiya, narrowly 狭窄地; 勉强地won Iraq's general election according to results released on Friday March 26th. Mr Allawi's alliance is ahead by a margin of 以...之差two seats, giving him the first chance to try to form a coalition government, but it is far from clear whether he will be able to get to a position to head the next government in Iraq.
The State of Law alliance which is led by the current prime minsiter, Nuri al-Maliki, came a close second. In third place is a Shia religious alliance that includes followers of a populist  平民主义者cleric 教士， 牧师, Muqtada al-Sadr, with a strong showing in the eastern slums[常用复]贫民窟[区]; of Baghdad and in three southern provinces. A Kurdish alliance, the fourth main block, swept the Kurds’ three provinces in the north.

The parties may still have to wait several more weeks while voting disputes are resolved and seats in parliament allocated. A complex formula will boost representation for women and minorities (including Christians) and award extra seats to the largest parties. Only then will the winner be revealed. The group with the most seats will not necessarily have won most votes.
The slowness of the count contrasted with the frenetic发狂的, 狂热的 pace of negotiations in Baghdad’s hotel lobbies and party headquarters. No alliance came even close to an outright十足的, 彻底的 win. Messrs Maliki and Allawi both face an uphill struggle to find a winning coalition. Their most obvious partners are the Kurds, who are part of the present government and will seek to stay on to defend their regional privileges. With two suitors起诉者 wooing them, they will demand extra concessions.
But the Kurds are no longer the sole kingmakers. Assuming they act as one block, including a newish reform party called Goran (meaning Change) as well as the two older ones, their 50-odd seats would still not be enough to give either Mr Maliki or Mr Allawi the 163 seats they need to command a majority in parliament.
So the Iraqi National Alliance, an umbrella group for Shia religious parties that campaigned strongly against both men, may hold the final balance.决定胜负 Within that alliance, Mr Sadr has a role. But another part of the National Alliance, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), could also play a part, even though it did badly in the election, getting only a dozen seats. As part of Mr Maliki’s current government, ISCI will also be keen to stay on board, enjoying the perks and patronage 光顾, 惠顾,of office. But it strongly opposes Mr Allawi’s anti-Iranian stance and in the past has quarrelled with Mr Maliki too. In any case, ISCI alone is too small to swing the balance.
Mr Sadr has more clout影响； 权势. He commands a militia known as the Mahdi Army that in the years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein battled ferociously against American, British and Iraqi government forces. In the election he cleverly exploited a legal provision letting voters rank candidates within an electoral block. His disciplined movement marshalled supporters to vote for specific candidates at the expense of others in his wider alliance. So in Baghdad, 11 of the 16 seats won by the National Alliance may go to Mr Sadr’s people. Overall, he may control up to 40 seats, perhaps enough to give Mr Maliki or Mr Allawi a majority together with the Kurds. But his price for co-operation is unclear.
The election results paint a spotty 质量不均匀的; 不规则的 picture of Iraqi democracy and political attitudes. Support for Mr Allawi, a secular现世的, 尘世的 Shia who once belonged to Saddam’s Baath party, exceeded expectations. But that does not mean his brand of non-sectarianadj. 不属于任何宗教派别的 politics has prevailed. Much of his support comes from disaffected抱不平的, 有叛意的, 不服的 Sunnis in the north and west and from pragmatic, secular-minded Shias in Baghdad. Mr Allawi got almost no seats in the swathe of Shia-populated provinces in the south.
For his part, Mr Maliki got most of his backing from a core constituency in the south and in the Shia parts of Baghdad. He may not win a single seat north of the capital. So the main race is between two moderate lists, each with a sectarian and geographic tilt. That is better than last time, in 2005, when the divide was between Shias, who voted en masse全体地一直地, and Sunnis, who largely boycotted the poll.
Another change is the thinning out of small parties. Iraq’s new political system favours large coalitions. The Unity Alliance, a cross-sectarian competitor to Mr Allawi led by Jawad al-Bolani, the interior minister, was almost wiped out. In Kurdistan the reformists of Goran, which did well in regional elections a year ago, failed to make headway. Yet even the minnow parties may suddenly acquire influence if the coalition of Mr Allawi or Mr Maliki falls just shy of a majority.
Or the two men may consider forming a government of national unity. Their views are much closer than their fierce and rhetorically exaggerated campaign rivalry suggests. Together they would have a comfortable majority—and a chance to reconcile Iraq’s two main Muslim sects. The trouble is that neither man can abide the idea of playing second fiddle充当副手. In the end, one of them—or both—may have to be shoved off the stage by ambitious lieutenants capable of reaching across the aisle.

comment:
as our old adage said, the election competition between the two candidates may possibly cause destructions to both sides. And this is not airy notionn of the circumstance, whereas on the light of deliberate contemplation of all the procession and factors affecting the final decision, you can easily understand why we said that.

But today the focus is not on the result of election, but some of the fatal aspects which make the final balance. By cognizing the relevance between them, we can get a panarama of the contemporary society infrastructure under the frenetic chaos among people. We have to say that sometimes maybe due to our miss of some minow factors we mistaken the final result totally. ironically ,but true.

tequilawineUID：2702008

Does he have what it takes称职?The Conservative leader, David Cameron, is still the favourite to be Britain’s next prime minister总理，首相Mar 31st 2010 | From The Economist print edition

HE HAS led the Conservative Party for more than four years and is the man most likely to lead Britain after the general election this spring. Yet people still wonder just who David Cameron is. This is not because he hides what he does or fudgesv. 粗制滥造; 捏造; 欺骗; 逃避责任; 捏造 what he thinks, as those on the receiving end of countless webcameron flashes and unending policy e-mails can attest. It is, rather, that his views are not always those of either his party or, perhaps, of his age.
The Economist talked to Mr Cameron on March 29th, in the last of a series of on-the-record interviews with the leaders of the three main political parties. Though only 15 years younger than Gordon Brown, prime minister and leader of the Labour Party, he seems of a different generation, with an easy, human touch that Mr Brown often struggles to achieve. He has more obviously in common with the similarly 40-ish, six-foot-tall leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg. But Mr Cameron is an altogether slicker number, and a far more experienced political operator.
Those looking for the Big Idea from Mr Cameron will be disappointed. He has a very English scepticism about grand theories. His identity lies somewhere between liberal London, where he has spent his adult life, and the conservative Home Counties, where he grew up. Ironically for a man whose Euroscepticism has irked Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, he may at heart be what continental adj. 大陆的 Europeans would recognise as a Christian Democrat. He espouses vt. 支持，赞成，嫁娶a social conservatism that dwells on细想 详述 broad issues, such as the cultural causes of poverty, not on the narrow lifestyle questions such as gay rights (on which he is anyway tolerant) that obsess some on the American right. He is an Atlanticist, though not a passionate one, and a gentle free-marketeer自由市场经济倡导者.
He does, however, have a distinctive analysis of his own country. British society, so his critique goes, is broken. The cause is the erosion of responsibility (his favourite word) by a hyperactive adj. 活动过度的; 活动亢进的; 极度活跃的 state. He is at his most animated when justifying his (arguably overstated) social pessimism, pointing to “our records against the rest of Europe on things like teenage pregnancy and drug abuse, alcohol, family worklessness, educational problems”. The analysis is open to criticism: the societies he sees as unbroken, including many in continental Europe, spend more on welfare than he would want to or can afford to.
The cure, he says, is giving power away, strengthening local government and empowering people directly by, for example, letting them set up their own schools. He is undogmatic adj. 非教条的 about the precise size of the state, deploring instead its over-centralisation; he prefers a big society to a big state. It remains to be seen whether that will bring relief to the overburdened public finances.
As the election nears, the Labour government is seeking to make much of its own (not unblemished adj. 无瑕疵的, 无污点的) experience in economic management, tarring v. 涂焦油于, 用焦油覆盖; 玷污, 污辱 the Tory opposition as obstructive novices n. 新手, 初学者. George Osborne, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, is a favourite target. Mr Cameron sticks up for Mr Osborne’s performance during the financial crisis, inviting opponents to “push as hard as [they] can”. The Tories supported the bank bail-out in 2008, he notes. Their opposition to the fiscal stimulus may have been attacked by some economists, but others agree that it “added £12.5 billion ($18.9 billion) to our debt without making a noticeable difference to the economy”.
In a contest  n. 竞赛, 争论 that he insists is a choice between the two main parties rather than a referendum n. 公民投票，请示书 on his alone, he has been clearer for longer about the fiscal squeeze required than Mr Brown. “Give me the equivalent of our asking people to retire a year later from 2016,” he says; at the party conference in October Mr Osborne was commendably adv. 值得表扬地ahead of the pack in outlining some specific measures to reduce the fiscal deficit. And Labour has been forced to face reality as a result. “You don’t hear investment versus cuts any more,” Mr Cameron says, referring to Labour’s favourite dividing line in elections past.
Nor, as the polls narrow, do you hear much detail these days about Tory plans to get a fiscal grip. Mr Osborne’s pledge partly to reverse the government’s planned increase in national-insurance (NI) contributions, announced this week, will be funded by cutting waste, a familiar theme on both sides of the aisle. This may be “doable adj. 可做的，可行的and deliverable”, as Mr Cameron claims, but he will not say precisely how.
The sting in the Falklands taleMr Cameron once called himself the “heir to Blair”. Where he least resembles the former prime minister is on foreign affairs, to which he brings case-by-case policies rather than informing ideals. Mr Blair was both Britain’s most Atlanticist and most Europhile prime minister; Mr Cameron is likely to be less of either.
Is there a special relationship with America? Yes, he says: “On any number of issues you see Britain and America working closer than with other allies.” But he points out that “you have to remember we are the junior partner. I think part of getting the relationship right is understanding how best to play the role.”
He is “happier than [he] was” with the way the war in Afghanistan is being fought, but “we are still in the situation where British troops are in charge of two-thirds of the population [in Helmand] but there are only 10,000 of us and 20,000 Americans.” There is muted praise for Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president: “At his best, he can do good things.”
What Mr Cameron is not happy with is America’s recent implication that Britain should negotiate with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. “I’ve always said the special relationship should be a frank and a candid one, and I think you should frankly and candidly say we’re disappointed.”
His view of Europe, too, is more nuanced than some might expect. He has been (rightly) criticised for pulling his party out of the centre-right grouping in the European Parliament to which the parties of Mrs Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, belong, and for cultivating the Euroscepticism of his party faithful. But he is a broadly restraining influence on it and, with so much to do at home, he will hardly relish v. 喜爱, 爱好; 欣赏 fights with Brussels. “I think people in Europe will be pleasantly surprised that we will be activist and engaged from day one,” he says. “But we have a very clear view about the direction we ought to go in.” He wants to win op-outs from the European Union’s social chapter and charter of fundamental rights. Few fancy his chances.
And what of his chances in the general election expected next month? The 17-point poll leads the Tories enjoyed last year have faded to margins less than half that size. The decline in the Tories’ popularity in recent months continues to puzzle, with some putting it down to a message that is too bleakly austere and others blaming it on something close to the opposite: a lack of Thatcherite punch and clarity.
In fact it probably owes more to the recent economic recovery, which seems strong enough to vindicate v. 维护, 表白, 辩护 the government’s handling of the recession but not so strong that a change of management can be risked safely. Labour’s poll rating has increased by more than the Conservatives’ has fallen. And the crisis has challenged the opposition as well as the government. After rebranding themselves as a party that could see beyond the market to social and environmental concerns, the Tories have had to re-rebrand themselves as sober adj. 清醒的, 节制的 stewards of a ruined economy. “I don’t feel too shocked by the tightening of the polls becauseI’ve always believed it’s a very big mountain we have to climb,” says Mr Cameron.
The anti-politics mood unleashed v. 解开...的皮带, 解放, 解除...的束缚by last year’s parliamentary-expenses scandal also makes it hard for any politician, however appealing, to electrify the public. The country’s propensity to fall for a leader the way it did in 1997 is no longer there. Being preferred to your opponents—which the Tories still are in every poll—may be the best any politician can aim for. “Labour would like nothing more than just to talk about the Conservatives and run away from their record,” says Mr Cameron. “We’re not going to let them do that.”

comment:
i mistaken Mr Cameron with the famous movie director, you know, who directed the blockbuster Avatar, in the first sight. later on, i got to know that they are two different guys in nonrelevant field, however both are appalled to intrude into our sight with their magnificent work.
the guy talked in the article has his particularly charming and personality, which bring us into some firce debate about the britain next election. and if he have what it takes in the supreme power. Great power comes great responsibility. although we got what the author depicted the features of our prince, we really care about what will he do in the future, handling the mire of financial crisis and so on.

tequilawineUID：2702008

The iPad and its kind are both a boon n. 恩惠; 利益 and a bane n. 克星, 祸根; 毁灭; 灾害; for book publishers

JOHN GRISHAM, a prolific 多产的, 结果实的author of legal thrillers使人毛骨悚然的小说, long refused to allow his books to be sold in electronic form. In a television interview last year, he lamented v. 哀悼; 悔恨; 悲叹that e-books and heavy discounting of printed books by big retailers were “a disaster in the long term” for the publishing industry. But last month Mr Grisham’s publisher announced that the author had had a change of heart: henceforth
adv. 自此以后; 今后 all of his books will be available in virtual form. His timing was impeccable无缺点的; 完善的. On April 3rd Apple is due to start shipping the first of its iPad tablet computers, which are expected to give a big boost to e-book sales.
The iPad’s impending arrival has created commercial intrigue worthy of a Grisham yarn. A group of big publishers, including Macmillan and HarperCollins, have been using Apple’s interest in e-books to persuade Amazon, which currently dominates sales of digital books, to renegotiate vi.  重新谈判, 再协商 its pricing model. At one point in January an angry Amazon briefly removed many of Macmillan’s books from its own virtual shelves before reinstating v. 使复原; 使复职them after some authors kicked up a fuss起哄 骚乱 大吵大闹.
Like many other parts of the media industry, publishing is being radically reshaped by the growth of the internet. Online retailers are already among the biggest distributors of books. Now e-books threaten to undermine sales of the old-fashioned kind. In response, publishers are trying to shore up支撑住 their conventional business while preparing for a future in which e-books will represent a much bigger chunk of sales.

Quite how big is the subject of much debate. PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy, reckons e-books will represent about 6% of consumer book sales in North America by 2013, up from 1.5% last year (see chart). Carolyn Reidy, the boss of Simon & Schuster, another big publisher, thinks they could account for 25% of the industry’s sales in America within three to five years. She may well be right if the iPad and other tablet computers take off, the prices of dedicated e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle keep falling and more consumers start reading books on smart-phones. Mobclix, an advertising outfit, reckons the number of programmes, or apps, for books on Apple’s iPhone recently surpassedv. 超越, 胜过that for games, previously the largest category.
Alert to such shifts, publishers are trying to undo废除; 使复原, 使失效; a mess that is largely of their own making. For some time they have operated a “wholesale” pricing model with Amazon under which the online retailer pays publishers for books and then decides what it charges the public for them. This has enabled it to set the price of many new e-book titles and bestsellers at $9.99, which is often less than it has paid for them. Amazon has kept prices low in order to boost demand for its Kindle, which dominates the e-reader market but faces stiff competition from Sony and others.


Publishers fret v. 烦恼，不满，磨损 that this has conditioned consumers to使某人适应于 expect lower prices for all kinds of books. And they worry that the downward spiral v. 盘旋; 螺旋形上升; 成螺旋形;will further erode their already thin margins—some have had to close imprints and lay off staff in recent years—as well as bring further dismay to struggling bricks-and-mortar房屋房产 booksellers (see article). Unless things change, some in the industry predict that publishers will suffer a similar fate to that of music companies, whose fortunes faded when Apple turned the industry upside down by selling individual songs cheaply online.
Ironically, publishers have turned to Apple to help them twist Amazon’s arm. Keen to line up lots of titles for new iPad owners, the company has agreed to an “agency model” under which publishers get to set the price at which their e-books are sold, with Apple taking 30% of the revenue generated. Faced with these deals, Amazon has reportedly agreed similar terms with several big publishers. As a result, the price of some popular e-books is expected to rise to $12.99 or $14.99.
Once Apple and Amazon have taken their cut, publishers are likely to make less money on e-books under this new arrangement than under the wholesale one—a price they seem willing to pay in order to limit Amazon’s influence and bolster vt. 支持，鼓励print sales. Yet there are good reasons to doubt whether this and other strategies, such as delaying the release of electronic versions of new books for several months after the print launch, will halt the creeping commoditisation of books.
Apple, for instance, is rumoured to have kept the option of charging much less for popular e-books if they are being heavily discounted elsewhere. Other firms, including the mighty Google, are likely to enter the fray n. 吵架; 打架#磨损, 争论, 打架 soon, which will only increase the competitive pressure.
This is particularly alarming for publishers because digital margins are almost as slender as print ones. True, e-books do not need to be printed and shipped to retailers. But these costs typically represent only a tenth of a printed book’s retail price, estimates Credit Suisse, an investment bank. Meanwhile, as David Young, the boss of Hachette Book Group, points out, publishers are incurring v. 招致, 带来, 惹起; 遭受 new costs in the form of investment in systems to store and distribute digital texts, as well as to protect them from piracy.
Publishers are investing in the internet in other ways too. A few are starting to build their own online groups of readers. For instance Tor.com, a publisher-run website for science-fiction and fantasy enthusiasts, highlights content relevant to its members, even if some of it comes from rival publishers. “This is a rare sign that the light’s finally gone on in publishing,” says Mike Shatzkin of Idea Logical, a consultancy. Sourcebooks, a medium-sized publisher that has developed an online group focused on poetry, found that sales of its books rose by more than 50% in the six weeks after poems from them had featured on the site.
Publishers are also pumpingv. 用唧筒抽; 打; 用唧筒抽吸...中的水等; 为...打气; 使用唧筒; 一阵阵喷出; 唧筒似地运动plenty of money into what Hachette’s Mr Young calls “enriched e-books”, which combine the printed word with audio, video and other media to create content that can command a premium price. The launch of the iPad will speed up this experimentation, but it is not the only device to catch publishers’ attention. HarperCollins, for instance, has sold hundreds of thousands of cartridges in Britain that let users read electronic versions of classic texts on Nintendo DS portable game consoles. Charlie Redmayne, the “chief digital officer” of one of its units, reckons many of the buyers would not have splashed out 随意花钱大肆挥霍on print editions, so the move to a new platform has created fresh demand for books.
Indeed, many publishing executives like to argue that the digital revolution could usher 引领 in a golden age of reading in which many more people will be exposed to digital texts. They also point out that new technologies such as print on demand, which makes printing short runs of physical books more economical, should help them squeeze more money out of the old-fashioned format. And they insist that the shift away from printed books will be slow, giving them more time to adapt to the brave new digital world.
Perhaps. But there are still plenty of inefficiencies in the supply chain for conventional books that firms such as Amazon and Apple can exploit. Many publishers, for example, still take far too long to get books to market in print or electronic form, missing valuable opportunities. Ms Reidy at Simon & Schuster says she has brought functions such as typesetting in-house to boost efficiency. At Sourcebooks responsibility for making books has even been shifted from the editorial team to the firm’s head of technology, underlining the need to think digitally right from the start of the commissioning process.
The publishing firms that survive what promises to be a wrenching transition will be those whose bosses and employees can learn quickly to think like multimedia impresarios n. 制作人，经理人，主办者 rather than purveyors n. 承办商, 粮食征购商, 承办商人 of perfect prose. Not all of them will be able to turn that particular page successfully.

tequilawineUID：2702008

The leaders of Russia and America will sign a new strategic-arms reduction treaty in PragueApr 4th 2010 | From The Economist online
JAS
• BARACK OBAMA will meet Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, in Prague on Thursday April 8th to sign a strategic-arms reduction treaty. Over ten years this will cut the number deployed v. 展开，配置，部署strategic warheads to 1,550 on each side. Delivery systems (missiles, bombers and the like) will be reduced to 700 apiece. That is still enough to wipe out whole continents, but it makes the Nobel peace prize sitting on Mr Obama’s mantelpiece n. 壁炉台，壁炉架look a little less like an invitation to hubris n. 傲慢, 骄傲.
• THE foreign ministers外交部长; of India and China will meet in Beijing on Monday 5th April. Asia’s two rising powers have a polite but tense relationship—thanks to their long-running and lengthy border dispute, and the sense that they are competing for the same slot n. 狭长孔; 投币口; 狭缝; 翼缝#足迹; 踪迹as Asia’s dominant power. India’s foreign minister, S.M. Krishna, and his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, are expected to hold talks on bilateral, regional and global themes.
• INDIA’S place in the world will also be under discussion when Tim Geitner, America’s Treasury secretary, visits Delhi on Tuesday 6th April. Mr Geitner will launch the US-India Economic and Financial Partnership with India’s finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee. America already has a similar partnership with China. Ties with India are cordial adj. 热忱的; 兴奋的; 诚恳的, after America offered support for India’s plans for its civil nuclear sector.
• THE British prime minister, Gordon Brown, is expected to make the short trip from his office in Downing Street to Buckingham Palace, on Tuesday April 6th, to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament, thus triggering a general election. Once the quaint adj. 古雅的, 奇怪的, 离奇有趣的rituals are over, a month of intensive campaigning will follow. The vote itself will probably be on May 6th. Polls suggest that Britain will see the Conservatives in power for the first time since 1997.
• COPYRIGHT law turns 300 on Friday 9th April. During Queen Anne’s reign in Britain an old system of royal warrants that gave control of works to a clique of publishers and printers was replaced with a law that allowed authors ownership of their work for a limited period.

comment:
yeah, it seems like two big guns sits in front of desk, talking with each other, negotiate for the future of the world. Ironically, people around the world are still happy to see the scene, without any conscienous of putting yourselves future on the soulder of others. It is called slavery.
And unavoidably, the splendid achievement gives the two countries and their governers some aura that splash out, after all, not everyone presnet has such honor to share this privilege.

tequilawineUID：2702008

Europe's leaders must act fast to stop Greece’s market contagion spreading

IF A sense of panic has started to grip Europe over the potential for Greece to default on its debts, and the contagion to spread rapidly to the continent’s other struggling economies, it has not yet struck Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council. He insisted on Wednesday April 28th that there was “no question” of Greece's debts being restructured. He also said leaders of the euro-zone countries would meet next month to consider how to activate their proposed joint lending programme with the IMF to support Greece. Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, delivered an almost identical message, saying that a Greek default was “out of the question”.

The calm demeanour n. 举止，态度，行为of Mr Trichet and Mr Van Rompuy is not shared by the markets. On Wednesday Greece said that it would ban the short-selling of shares for two months to prevent speculators doing further damage to the country’s banks. The previous day, shares in Greek banks had plunged by nearly 10% and the Athens stockmarket as a whole fell by 6% on fears that the country would soon suffer another downgrade of its debts. Those fears proved entirely justified. After the markets closed Standard & Poor’s heaped indignity on Greece by cutting the rating of its sovereign bonds to “junk” status. It also cut Greece's banks to “junk” because of their hefty重的, 肌肉发达的 exposure to government debt.

The markets still see the risk of a Greek default as high

Although the move to ban short-selling steadied Greece's stockmarket somewhat on Wednesday, the chances of the country defaulting on its debts were still perceived by the bond markets as high. Spreads on Greek government bonds政府债券 (the risk premium compared with German bonds) reached a 13-year high as investors worried that the proposed rescue plan for Greece could stall. Talks between Greece, the European Union and the IMF got under way last week.

Greece was initially seeking up to