長安的AW習作&Economist閱讀分析

長安UID: 2573189

Economist 2010.03.10

ONE day early this summer, when it was still possible to claim progress in Afghanistan, Robert Gates, America’s defence secretary, was at an Asian security gathering, reeling off(v.一口氣說)
the names of countries who had contributed to it. The list—Canada, Mongolia, Poland—went on and on, while the harrumphing(v.n.哼氣) of a Chinese general in the third row grew ever louder. Eventually, he held back no longer. “Why no China?” he demanded. “Where is China on this list?”

Where indeed? The question seemed odd. Unlike the other countries on Mr Gates’s list, China has no military presence in Afghanistan. Though China has peacekeepers as far afield as Haiti and Sudan, it is allergic to sending(be allergic to sth.) them to neighbouring countries. Perhaps, this columnist later inquired of the general, he meant the modest intelligencethat China shares with the United States on jihadistswith connections in Xinjiang, China’s restive, preponderantly Muslim, western region? No, he replied testily. “I mean the mine. Our copper mine.”

Since then, the mine, at Aynak, a former al-Qaeda stronghold in Logar province just south of Kabul, has shot to prominence. It is the second-biggest untapped source of copper in the world, no less, and China’s $3.5 billion investment, signed in late 2007, is easily Afghanistan’s biggest. Several miles of sandbags and chain-link fence now surround the mine. Row upon row of(一排排的)
neat prefabricated dormitories house several hundred Chinese. When production starts, from 2011, the Chinese owners get half the output and a multi-billion-dollar return on their investment.

And here the controversy begins. For the mine’s security, in a land that epitomises(epitome,n.v.摘要，概括) insecurity, is paid for by others. Some 1,500 Afghan police guard the site, subsidised by the Japanese. The American army’s Tenth Mountain Division patrols the area. As America wobbles(tumble) over its Afghanistan commitments, Robert Kaplan, an American journalist, puts it thus in the
New York Times: “The problem is that while America is sacrificing its blood and treasure, the Chinese will reap
the benefits(坐享其成). The whole direction of America’s military and diplomatic effort is toward an exit strategy, whereas the Chinese hope to stay and profit.”

Mr Kaplan acknowledges that exploiting mineral reserves creates Afghan jobs and fills the state exchequer(n.國庫). He says China is not ordained to be(注定要成為) America’s adversary. So America’s vision of a moderately stable Afghanistan that no longer harbours extremists is not at odds with(矛盾) China’s vision of a secure conduit for natural resources dug out in Afghanistan or brought up from ports on the Indian Ocean. Still, Mr Kaplan’s opinion, and a more critical strain, which argues that a murky bid process gave China the Aynak mine and that anyway such Chinese projects do not bring local prosperity, has touched a nerve in China. Even calling China “resource-hungry” is inflammatory(a.煽動性的，發炎的), says one commentary. It all adds a “precarious element” to Sino-American relations.

If that is so, China is partly to blame. A growing chorus(一致的聲調)in its official press calls for America to admit its blundersand pull its troops out of Afghanistan. And though Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, recently assured Pakistan it had American support in the face of Taliban terror, China points out that it will be in Pakistan long after the Americans are gone. China prides itself on being Pakistan’s “all-weather” friend, regardless of the prevailing government—civilian and democratic, or military and repressive.

For Indian hawks, China’s growing presence in Afghanistan and deep entrenchment in Pakistan, including big infrastructure(n.基礎設施) projects in disputed Kashmir, is all too much. Giving themselves further frights(n.驚嚇.可數), they point to a letter the China-dominated Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO, which includes Russia and Central Asian members) recently received from the Taliban. It asked for SCO help in driving the American infidels out of Afghanistan. To the hawks, ever sensitive about historical mischief from the north-west, this is another Great Game. So India, too is investing heavily in Afghanistan.

Yet for all China’s sneering at America’s military efforts in Afghanistan, China offers no alternative. For now, both countries’ interests are not far apart.
China is as concerned as is the United States(as adj. as 倒裝china is as concerned as is the USA)—and India, for that matter—about the prospect of a return to pre-war days. The arrival in Palau this week of six Uighurs, originally from Xinjiang, and recently freed from prison in Guantánamo, is a reminder. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan had given them shelter. China still shivers at the idea of
disaffected Uighurs fleeing to the wilds of Afghanistan or Pakistan to consort with jihadists. American military power so close to China is not welcome in Beijing; Taliban-backed(塔利班撐腰的) militant havens even less so.

The Pakistani connection
Admittedly, for all China’s self-serving efforts to portray Xinjiang as victim of extremist violence by militants linked to al-Qaeda, evidence for this is slim. Chinese concerns about a jihadist movement spreading across its borders from Afghanistan or Pakistan have until now been overblown. A home-grown reaction to Chinese oppression is reason enough to explain Uighur unrest. Yet even Pakistanis have at times been surprised by the vehemence of China’s concerns. When Pakistan’s then military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, visited Beijing in 2003 to sign an extradition treaty between the two countries, he was taken aback by the ferocity of Chinese remonstrances about Uighur militants on Pakistani soil.

So China’s signals that it wants limits on the spread of American power in Central Asia should be taken with a pinch of salt(a.有保留的). The rhetoric is like that over America’s presence in East Asia: China grumbles about it publicly, but values America for its restraint on Japan. In Afghanistan China grumbles but lets America guard its economic interests. There’s little unusual in that: rising powers have always hitched a ride on the back of(搭車，占便宜) declining ones.


這篇commentary真的很尖銳，即使兩耳不聞窗外事的書呆子，看完后也好像有些天下興亡匹夫有責的慨嘆。

長安UID: 2573189

Economist.03.11.

Cross my palm with euros?
The dollar’s days as the world’s reserve currency are
far from
over

ShutterstockWORRIES about the dollar’s dominance of the global monetary system are not new. But debate about replacing the
beleaguered(v.beleaguer圍攻)dollar, whose trade-weighted value has dropped by 11.5% since
its peak
in March 2009, has resurfaced
in the wake of
a global financial and economic crisis that began in America. China and Russia, which have huge reserves that are mainly dollar denominated, have talked about shifting away from the
greenback(n.美鈔). India changed the composition of its reserves(n.儲備金) by buying 200 tonnes of gold from the IMF.

None of this threatens the dominance of the dollar yet, particularly as a dramatic shift out of the currency would be damaging to the countries (such as China) that hold a huge amount of
dollar-denominated
assets. But a new paper
by（省略动词）economists at the IMF, released on Wednesday November 11th, acknowledges that the global crisis has
reignited(rekindled) the debate about
anchoring the world’s monetary system on one country’s currency(anchor on全部投資在).

Some say that America’s role as the
principal（请回忆一连串的重要，eg：crucial important consequent essential necessary vital significant major main momentous staple central）issuer of the global reserve currency gives it an unfair advantage. America has a unique ability to borrow from foreigners in its own currency, and wins when the dollar depreciates, since its assets are mainly in foreign currency and its liabilities in dollars. By one estimate America enjoyed a net capital gain of around $1 trillion from the gradual depreciation of the dollar in the years before the crisis.

In a sense
the world
is hostage toAmerica’s ability to maintain the value of the dollar. But as the IMF points out, the currency’s primacy arises at least partly because China and other emerging countries have chosen to accumulate dollar reserves.The depth ofAmerica’s financial markets andthe country’s open capital account
have made the dollar attractive.(多多变换句型。估计很多人用it is attractive for dollar because of the depth of america’s financial markets and the country’s open captical account)
So some of the advantage has been earned.

Butlarge and persistent
surpluses in countries like China mean continued demand for American assets, reducing the need for fiscal adjustment by either country. This,in turn, has contributed to thebuild-up
of the macroeconomic(n.macroeconomics宏觀經濟學)
imbalances(n.失衡imbalance.) that manyblame for
the financial crisis.

Dealing with these imbalances could begin by finding ways to reduce reserve accumulation in emerging countries. The IMFreckons that about two-thirds of current reserves (about $4 trillion-$4.5 trillion) are held by countries as insurance against shocks, including sudden reversals of capital flows, banking crises and so on.
In theory,groups ofcountries couldpool
reserves, so that a smaller amount would suffice than if countries each maintain their ownbuffers. Otheralternatives includeprecautionary
lines of credit, such as the American Federal Reserve’s with the central banks of Brazil and Mexico, or the IMF’s flexible credit line.

But what are the alternatives to(n. A replacement of sth.) relying on the dollar? One possibility is a system with several competing reserve currencies. Over time, the euro and China’s yuan (if it became convertible) could emerge as competitors.This would require
a great deal of policy co-ordination among issuing countries. But by having several reserve currencies the “privilege” that America now enjoys would be available more widely,providing an incentive to
compete to attract users to different currencies.

Another alternative is a greater reliance on SDRs, the IMF’s
quasi-currency, whichoperates as
a claim on
a basket of(一系列的.many/several)currencies: the dollar, euro, sterling and yen. Because the SDR’s value depends on several currencies, it
shares many of the benefits of a multiple-currency system. But even the IMF says that using SDRs seems “doubtful unless the system…fails in a major way”.

The mostradical
solution of all is a new global currency that could be used in international transactions and would
float alongside
domestic currencies. The fund argues that this would have to be issued by a new international monetary institution “disconnected from
the economic problems of any individual country”. This currency couldserve as
a
risk-free
global asset.

Radical as this may sound（好句型。。倒装）, it is not a new idea. John Maynard Keynes had something similar in mind when he proposed an International Clearing Union. This global bank would issue its own currency, called the bancor, in which all trade accounts would
be settled.
In the absence of
such a bank the world will have to make do with the current system. So worries about the dollar’s value aside, its global dominance is secure for now.


思路很清晰。先講了金融危機美元浮動，造成對世界其他國家的損失及美國自身的影響。
然後提出解決辦法，以美元為黃金儲備的現狀可以用三種方法取代。
但是目前美元作為黃金儲備的地位還是穩固的。

長安UID: 2573189

Economist. 03.12

Widow of suicide goalkeeper Robert Enke tells how he hid depression

The widow of Germany's national goalkeeper, Robert Enke, choked back(v.抑制) tears as she described how he lived a life of fear before throwing himself in front of the train that killed him.
The suicide has stunned Germany and triggered(v.引發) a debate about the concealment of mental illlness in high-profile(n.a.高姿態的，立場明確的a position that attracts lots of attention and publicity) competitive sport. A friendly game against Chileon Saturday has been cancelled as a mark of respect.
The 32-year-old keeper had been fighting for years against clinical depression but had been determined to keep it secret lest(a.唯恐 Hide this letter lest he should see it. Lest sb. Should do.)
it spell the end of his footballing career, said his widow Teresa. Most of all he was afraid that the ensuing(a.concomitant) publicity would lead to the authorities cancelling their adoption of a new-born baby last May.
"When he was acutely(a.greatly, very) depressive, it was difficult," said his 30 year old widow, dressed all in black, "Difficult above all because he didn't want anything to get out. That's the way he wanted it, because he was terrified of losing his sport."
Mrs Enke appeared at a press conference organised by her husband's old club Hannover 96. Although officials stressed that it was her own decision to talk to reporters less than 24 hours after the suicide, it was plain that the club wanted to demonstrate it had not put Enke under pressure or encouraged him to hide his illness. They were simply unaware of a problem.
"We were very close, yet even I didn't notice how acute was the threat," said Valentin Markser, Enke's therapist, who had been treating him since 2003. "He knew how to hide the scope of his illness, had developed defence mechanisms(n.防禦機制)."
A suicide letter was found on the passenger seat of his abandoned Mercedes jeep, in which Enke apologised to his wife and to his doctor for not revealing the true depth of his depression, and expressed his sense that there was no alternative.
That morning, before setting out for goalkeeper training, Enke had rung his doctors and told them he was breaking off treatment since he felt well enough to carry on. After training he appears to have driven around and then, at about 6pm, he parked close to a level crossing. It was a place where he would go sometimes with his four dogs and was only about 2.5 km away from his home.
As the train approached at 160 km per hour, the keeper left the note and his wallet on the side seat of his car, the doors unlocked as if he had just popped out to buy a newspaper, and lay down on the tracks.
Dr Markser said that football had if anything helped Enke control his depressive phases.
His widow agreed: "It was what he lived for, it was life elixir(panacea.仙丹), and knowing how much it meant to him I would go with Robert to the training sessions."
Yet it was also the fear of failure on the pitch that contributed to Enke's condition.
When he came to me in 2003 he was suffereing from depressive bouts and failure anxieties," said Dr Markser.
"I treated him for months on an almost daily basis so that by the Spring of 2004 he could play again in Spain and then in Hanover."
He appeared to stabilise(v.穩定), but this October he was hit by a stomach virus that weakened him. He slipped from the national squad(n.v.班，集體) for several matches, even though the trainer stressed that he was the first choice as goalkeeper for Germany in the 2010 World Cup squad. He was being groomed as the natural successor to goalkeeping veterans Oliver Kahn and Jens Lehman.
The combination of high expectations and his own sense of physical weakness, the nagging fear(inextricable.無法擺脫的，糾纏的) that his mental state would somehow be revealed, all compounded(v.exacerbate加重惡化) his depression.
And none of his co-players noticed anything. "When I discussed it with them on Wednesday morning they were genuinely flabbergasted(v.surprised, stunned), really moved, needed to discuss the implications seriously among themselves," said Theo Zwanziger, chairman of the German Football Association.
A similar fate befell one of Germany's most talented players, Sebastian Dreisler, who dropped out of the game in 2007, at the age of 27, because of the impossibility of balancing a depressive condition and keeping up an act.
"In the cabin(v.抑制n小木屋)of Bayern Muenchen you only succeed if you say - 'I'm the greatest'," said Mr Dreisler, who is no longer a sportsman.
"You pump yourself up and repress your true feelings. On the one side there was my talent and ambition, on the other this feeling that you can't do anything."
But the crucial factor for Robert Enke, said his widow, was the deep fear that everything was about to crumble: not only the football career but also his family.
Three years ago, the couple had lost their two year old daughter Lara. She had a serious heart defect and had spent much of her life in intensive care.
"You live with the knowledge that if a call comes from a nurse at midnight, it is to tell you to come and say your farewells to your daughter," said Enke in a 2007 interview. "That's when you start to fear the sound of a telephone."
Today Mrs Enke said:"After Lara's death we were fused together, and we thought we can do this together. I told him all the time, we'll find a solution."
In May, they adopted Leila - but his fears for the new child, however healthy, piled unforeseen pressures on the goalkeeper.
"He didn't want to seek professional help any more, and he didn't want it because he was afraid that it would all come out -and that we would lose Leila," said his widow.
"It was the fear about what people would say about a child with a depressive father. And I always told him - don't worry. Right to the end he cared lovingly for Leila."
Ms Enke's repressed tears broke out when she accepted that her husband's suicide was a kind of personal defeat.
"We thought that we could do it all, that with love everything was possible. But sometimes it's not enough."


此文比較通俗，故事性很強，講了Germany's national goalkeeper, Robert Enke, committed suicide because of an inextricable depression.現代人在重視身體健康的同時也要關注mental health. physical and psycological health都很重要。

長安UID: 2573189

Economist.03.13

Hispanic higher educationClosing the gap

Improving performance is linked in part to immigration policy

THE University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP) is one of the mostbinationalof America’s big universities. Some 90% of its students come from the
border
plex—the Texan city of El Paso and its much larger sister-city, Ciudad Juárez, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. More than 70% of its students are Mexican or Mexican-American.

And that, in turn, means that the El Paso campus is rather different from the University of Texas’s flagship(n.旗艦。執牛耳者this dictionary is the flagship of Oxford's range of learners dictionaries.) campus in Austin. More than half of UTEP students are among the first in their families to go to college, and roughly a third come from families with incomes below $20,000 a year. Diana Natalicio, UTEP’s president, says that for many of her students trouble at work, or an unexpected expense, can derail(v.使錯軌，阻擾，大亂)a whole year of college. UTEP tries to help, offering after-hours advice and instalment plans for tuition fees. Such measures have helped it to become one of the country’s leading sources of degrees for Hispanic students.

UTEP’s experience provides pointers(n.指針,direction) for college administrators elsewhere, who are looking for ways to close the gap in achievement between Hispanic and “Anglo” students. According to a report in October from the Pew Hispanic Centre, 89% of Latino high-school students say that a college degree is important, but only 48% plan to go to university themselves. Hispanic students are more likely to drop out of high school than Anglos, and those who finish are less likely to go on to college. Those who go are more likely to enroll in two-year community colleges, which have lower rates of completion than four-year universities. In 2007, according to the National Centre for Education Statistics, only 7.5% of bachelor’s degrees were awarded to Hispanic students, even though Latinos made up about 15% of the American population that year.

Most Latino college students are native-born Americans, but the Mexican-born students have a hard time, and youngsters without the right documents have the hardest time of all. Stella Flores, of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, argues that the best thing that can be done at the state level is to adopt policies that allow all of a state’s high-school students to pay fees at its public universities at the discounted rate that normally applies to people from that state, regardless of their legal status.

Such policies already exist in a number of states,
including California and Texas, where the Latino population is so large that few like the idea of denying a proper education to crowds of undocumented youngsters. A federal bill called the DREAM Act would expand that approach and provide some undocumented students with a path to citizenship, but it is hardly at the top of the long to-do list now facing Congress. Separately, measures are afoot(in the process of preparing. 在準備中的) to expand federal financial aid to students, and over the summer President Barack Obama announced that the federal government is to put about $12 billion into community colleges.

In the meantime, Deborah Santiago of Excelencia in Education, a non-profit research group, says that some good steps are free. For example, El Camino College in California holds pronunciation classes for staff who might otherwise struggle with Hispanic names. When students are crossing the stage to get their diplomas, they should not have their names butchered(v.n.屠殺,劊子手,搞砸) in front of the gathered family and friends.

Hispanic population.老話題了，人口激增，問題很多。德州是mexicon最多的。

Over the past 20 years economic freedom has outpaced
political liberty. Neither should be taken for granted
“OF ALL places it was in divided Berlin in divided Germany in divided Europe that the cold war erupted into an east-west street party,” this newspaper observed 20 years ago (see article). Even to those who had been confident of the eventual triumph of the West, the fall of the Berlin Wall was surprisingly accidental. When 200,000 East Germans took advantage of Hungary’s decision to open its borders and fled to the West, their communist government decided to modify the travel restrictions that imprisoned them. Asked about the timing, the unbriefed(v.brief作簡短彙報)
propaganda minister mumbled: “As far as I know, effective immediately(馬上生效).” When that was reported on television, the Berliners were off. Baffled border guards who would have shot their "comrades” a week earlier let the crowd through—and a barrier that had divided the world was soon being gleefully dismantled. West Germany’s chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was so unready for history that he was out of the country.
The destruction of the Iron Curtain(n.貼墻，阻止交流的無形屏障) on November 9th 1989 is still the most remarkable political event of most people’s lifetimes: it set free millions of individuals and it brought to an end a global conflict that threatened nuclear annihilation. For liberals in the West, it still stands as a reminder both of what has been won since and what is still worth fighting for.

Remember the Stasi, but don’t forget the fridges(n.電冰箱). Yet the past two decades have seen economic freedom advance further than political freedom. Talk 20 years ago of a peaceful new world order has disappeared. New divisions have emerged out of nationalism, religion or just “fear of the other”. Rather than making the case for democracy unassailable(a.無懈可擊的impregnable), plenty of countries, including, alas, a few of the old Warsaw Pact members, most of the Arab world and China, have been able to
run shamelessly repressive authoritarian regimes. When Western leaders visit Moscow, Riyadhor Beijing, they merely mumble about human rights. The presumption has become that such regimes will endure.
By contrast, “globalisation”, that awkward term that covers the freer movement of goods, capital, people and ideas around the globe, has become the governing principle of commerce. That does not mean it is universally accepted: witness the travails(n.分娩中的痛苦，pang) of the Doha round of trade talks. But few places openly oppose it. In the economic sphere, illiberalism usually has to disguise itself through governments trying to adapt it, stressing “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “fair trade” and so on. Even after the crunch, the commercial classes assume that the world will become more integrated: who can resist economic logic and technology?
It is not hard to see why such a presumption should exist. Consider two successes of economic liberalism, both somewhat under-appreciated
at the moment. The first is its role 20 years ago (see article). The East Berliners rushing to the West were not just fleeing the Stasi; they also came in search of fridges, jeans and Coca-Cola from supermarkets. By then communism, for all its tanks and missiles, was plainly a less efficient economic machine. Mikhail Gorbachev deserves credit for allowing so many serfs to escape so peacefully; but the Soviet Union crumbled because it could not produce the goods.
And even if the current round of globalisation technically began before the wall fell, it was spurred on by it. (The word seldom appeared in The Economist before 1986 and began to be common only in the 1990s.) Globalisation would have meant much less if half of Europe had
been bricked in; many instinctively statist giants of the emerging world, such as Brazil, India or even China, would have been far slower to open up their economies if a semi-credible alternative had still existed.
That points to the second under-appreciated success. At present capitalism is too often judged by the excesses of a few bankers. But when historians come to write about the past quarter-century, Lehman Brothers and Sir Fred “the Shred” Goodwin will account for fewer pages than the 500m people dragged out of absolute poverty into something resembling the middle class. Their success is not just a wonderful thing in itself—the greatest leap forward in economic history. It has also helped spur on other chaotic freedoms: look at the way ideas, good, bad and mad, are texted around the world.
For in the end, no matter what China’s leaders tell Mr Obama when he visits Beijing later this month, economic and political liberty are linked—not as tightly as people hoped 20 years ago, but still linked. Look forward, and China’s internet-obsessed emerging middle class will surely have an appetite for
liberty beyond the purely economic. Change could happen as unexpectedly as it did in 1989. Even the most fearsome fortresses(fortress.) of repression can eventually be breached. Then it was Honecker and Ceausescu; tomorrow it might be Castro, Ahmadinejad or Mugabe; one day Chávez or even Hu.
Marx to marketPut another way, the presumption that political freedom will never catch up with economic freedom could turn out to be joyously wrong. The problem is that this gap could also be closed another way. Economic freedom could be slowed down, perhaps even reversed, by politics.
For Western liberals, even ones who believe in open markets as unreservedly as this paper, that means facing up to some hard facts about the popularity of their creed. Western capitalism’s victory over its rotten communist rival does not ensure it an enduring franchise from voters. As Karl Marx pointed out during globalisation’s last great surge forward in the 19th century, the magic of comparative advantage can be wearing—and cruel. It leaves behind losers in concentrated clumps (a closed tyre factory, for instance), whereas the more numerous winners (everybody driving cheaper cars) are disparate. It makes the wealthy very wealthy: in a global market, you will hit a bigger jackpot than in a local one. And capitalism has always been prone to spectacular booms and busts.
Above all politics remains stubbornly local. All that economic integration has not been matched politically. And to the extent that there is a global guarantor of the current system, it is America, a country which as globalisation works will continue to lose relative power. Thanks to its generosity in exporting the secrets of success, it now has China closer to its shoulder and other emerging giants are catching up. Public support for protectionism has surged in the United States.
In the affairs of man, wounded pride and xenophobiaoften trump economic reason. Why else would Russia terrorise its gas customers? Or Britons demonise the EU? In a rational world China would not stir up
Japanophobiaand rich Saudis would not help Islamic extremists abroad. Many businesspeople, too busy on their BlackBerrys to worry about nationalism or fundamentalism, might ponder Keynes’s description of a prosperous Londoner before August 1914: sipping his morning tea in bed, ordering goods from around the world over the telephone, regarding that age of globalisation as “normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement” and dismissing “the politics of militarism” and “racial and cultural rivalries” as mere “amusements in his daily newspaper”.
Be prepared, be very preparedRecognising the political shortcomings of globalisation should redouble(v.加倍重複)Western liberals’ determination to defend it: to close the gap in the right way. That involves a myriad of things, from promoting human rights to designing better jobs policies (see article). But it also requires defending the enormous benefits that capitalism has brought the world since 1989 more forcefully than the West’s leaders have done thus far. And above all perhaps, taking nothing for granted.

Review:
dismantle：拆除, 剥除, 分解, 取消
chancellor:(英)名誉校长，(美)大学校长；(德)总理
nuclear annihilation: 核毁灭
unassiailable: 攻不破的(无争论余地的, 无懈可击的)
stakeholder: someone entrusted to hold the stakes for two or more persons betting against one another; must deliver the stakes to the winner
jackpot: 彩票头等奖，极大的成功
xenophobia：仇外，排外

Economist. 03.12

Widow of suicide goalkeeper Robert Enke tells how he hid depression

The widow of Germany's national goalkeeper, Robert Enke, choked back(v.抑制) tears as she described how he lived a life of fear before throwing himself in front of the train that killed him.
The suicide has stunned Germany and triggered(v.引發) a debate about the concealment of mental illlness in high-profile(n.a.高姿態的，立場明確的a position that attracts lots of attention and publicity) competitive sport. A friendly game against Chileon Saturday has been cancelled as a mark of respect.
The 32-year-old keeper had been fighting for years against clinical depression but had been determined to keep it secret lest(a.唯恐 Hide this letter lest he should see it. Lest sb. Should do.)
it spell the end of his footballing career, said his widow Teresa. Most of all he was afraid that the ensuing(a.concomitant) publicity would lead to the authorities cancelling their adoption of a new-born baby last May.
"When he was acutely(a.greatly, very) depressive, it was difficult," said his 30 year old widow, dressed all in black, "Difficult above all because he didn't want anything to get out. That's the way he wanted it, because he was terrified of losing his sport."
Mrs Enke appeared at a press conference organised by her husband's old club Hannover 96. Although officials stressed that it was her own decision to talk to reporters less than 24 hours after the suicide, it was plain that the club wanted to demonstrate it had not put Enke under pressure or encouraged him to hide his illness. They were simply unaware of a problem.
"We were very close, yet even I didn't notice how acute was the threat," said Valentin Markser, Enke's therapist, who had been treating him since 2003. "He knew how to hide the scope of his illness, had developed defence mechanisms(n.防禦機制)."
A suicide letter was found on the passenger seat of his abandoned Mercedes jeep, in which Enke apologised to his wife and to his doctor for not revealing the true depth of his depression, and expressed his sense that there was no alternative.
That morning, before setting out for goalkeeper training, Enke had rung his doctors and told them he was breaking off treatment since he felt well enough to carry on. After training he appears to have driven around and then, at about 6pm, he parked close to a level crossing. It was a place where he would go sometimes with his four dogs and was only about 2.5 km away from his home.
As the train approached at 160 km per hour, the keeper left the note and his wallet on the side seat of his car, the doors unlocked as if he had just popped out to buy a newspaper, and lay down on the tracks.
Dr Markser said that football had if anything helped Enke control his depressive phases.
His widow agreed: "It was what he lived for, it was life elixir(panacea.仙丹), and knowing how much it meant to him I would go with Robert to the training sessions."
Yet it was also the fear of failure on the pitch that contributed to Enke's condition.
When he came to me in 2003 he was suffereing from depressive bouts and failure anxieties," said Dr Markser.
"I treated him for months on an almost daily basis so that by the Spring of 2004 he could play again in Spain and then in Hanover."
He appeared to stabilise(v.穩定), but this October he was hit by a stomach virus that weakened him. He slipped from the national squad(n.v.班，集體) for several matches, even though the trainer stressed that he was the first choice as goalkeeper for Germany in the 2010 World Cup squad. He was being groomed as the natural successor to goalkeeping veterans Oliver Kahn and Jens Lehman.
The combination of high expectations and his own sense of physical weakness, the nagging fear(inextricable.無法擺脫的，糾纏的) that his mental state would somehow be revealed, all compounded(v.exacerbate加重惡化) his depression.
And none of his co-players noticed anything. "When I discussed it with them on Wednesday morning they were genuinely flabbergasted(v.surprised, stunned), really moved, needed to discuss the implications seriously among themselves," said Theo Zwanziger, chairman of the German Football Association.
A similar fate befell one of Germany's most talented players, Sebastian Dreisler, who dropped out of the game in 2007, at the age of 27, because of the impossibility of balancing a depressive condition and keeping up an act.
"In the cabin(v.抑制n小木屋)of Bayern Muenchen you only succeed if you say - 'I'm the greatest'," said Mr Dreisler, who is no longer a sportsman.
"You pump yourself up and repress your true feelings. On the one side there was my talent and ambition, on the other this feeling that you can't do anything."
But the crucial factor for Robert Enke, said his widow, was the deep fear that everything was about to crumble: not only the football career but also his family.
Three years ago, the couple had lost their two year old daughter Lara. She had a serious heart defect and had spent much of her life in intensive care.
"You live with the knowledge that if a call comes from a nurse at midnight, it is to tell you to come and say your farewells to your daughter," said Enke in a 2007 interview. "That's when you start to fear the sound of a telephone."
Today Mrs Enke said:"After Lara's death we were fused together, and we thought we can do this together. I told him all the time, we'll find a solution."
In May, they adopted Leila - but his fears for the new child, however healthy, piled unforeseen pressures on the goalkeeper.
"He didn't want to seek professional help any more, and he didn't want it because he was afraid that it would all come out -and that we would lose Leila," said his widow.
"It was the fear about what people would say about a child with a depressive father. And I always told him - don't worry. Right to the end he cared lovingly for Leila."
Ms Enke's repressed tears broke out when she accepted that her husband's suicide was a kind of personal defeat.
"We thought that we could do it all, that with love everything was possible. But sometimes it's not enough."


今天看電影寫影評，唉，又墮落了一天。還有29天AW，抓緊！

長安UID: 2573189

Economist.03.14

Not-so-wonderful CopenhagenNov 18th 2009 | NEW YORK
A forthcoming climate-change summit will not produce a binding(n.封皮a.具有約束力the agreement is binding on both parties.) deal on emissions. EXPECTATIONS for the Copenhagen climate conference, held next month in Denmark, have been steadily
dwindling. On Sunday November 15th, as Barack Obama toured Asia, he and the Danish prime minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, quietly agreed what many had anticipated—that no
binding agreement
would be reached at the conference. There is now no hope of new legal targets for emissions-reductions to replace those set out in the Kyoto Protocol and which will
lapse(n.v.墮落，失效)
in 2012. Instead the pair suggested that the best to be expected is a political deal on cutting emissions.
Some of the blame for this must be directed at Capitol Hill. Not only will Mr Obama now not sign a
cap-and-trade bill
（注：cap原意上限，这里指污染物排放限额。这个短语大意就是以钱换得排放限额的放宽）before Copenhagen; the Senate is not even expected to pass one. The
House of Representatives（众议院）passed in June its version of cap-and-trade but the
Senate（参议院）,preoccupied by
a debate over the reform of health care, has left climate talks to
inch(v.缓慢前进) along slowly behind. John Kerry, one of the Senate’s cap-and-trade champions, now says he hopes for a vote on the bill only in the spring.
But American congressmen are not alone in
shouldering
（to assume the burden or responsibility of <shoulder the blame>）responsibility. Each
tortuous(a.曲折的)
round of negotiations ahead of Copenhagen has lengthened the list of issues
up for debate. The negotiating text is now a snarl(v.吼叫n.混亂) of material that few parties can agree upon. And big developing countries have been almost as
immovable
as America, at least publicly. China’s president said in September that his country would in time cut the amount of carbon dioxide it emits per unit of GDP by a “notable amount”. But Sun Guoshun, a Chinese diplomat in Washington, says that a figure is unlikely to emerge before Copenhagen. India (a much smaller polluter) has steadfastly resisted binding targets for poor countries. Many in Washington believe that America, just as it did at Kyoto,will not accept a deal that requires nothing concrete on emissions from the developing world. Yet this does not mean that America will never
get around to（to do something that you have been intending to do for some time）cutting emissions. During Mr Obama’s trip to China climate change was
at the top of the agenda. Some had hoped that Mr Obama and Hu Jintao, China’s president, might announce a means of
breaking the negotiating deadlock. Instead they unveiled(v.公布揭開) some practical measures on energy.
These include the creation of a Sino-American clean-energy research centre, with initial funding of $150m, and an electric-vehicles initiative. A plan was also
aired(to expose to public view or bring to public notice）to
increase energy efficiency, especially in buildings. By some estimates, China will add housing and office space equivalent to America’s entire stock over the next 20 years.
The two countries also promised to work together on “cleaner” coal (both countries
sit on huge reserves
of the stuff). Carbon –capture –and -storage technology for coal-fired power plants does not yet work
at the scaleand cost required. But James Rogers, the head of Duke Energy, a big American utility, says optimistically that perhaps only China has the resources to develop a workable system of carbon-capture, and America couldreap the benefits. Last, the two agreed to co-operate on finding and using natural gas from shale. Gas power emits just half the carbon-dioxide of coal.
Focusing on measures like efficiency and cleaner power rather than targets may be the only way to get a bill through the Senate and thus make a binding international deal possible. But the
interplay
between international negotiations and the Senate’s deliberationsis delicate. The Senate wants proof that developing countries will not
get off the hook(to allow someone or help someone to get out of a difficult situation. Ex: I wasn't prepared to let her off the hook that easily.）while China and India will avoid commitments as long as it seems that the Senate is unwilling to move. Copenhagen is now unlikely to be celebrated as the city where the world took big steps towards tackling climate change. (句型：Copenhagen is not unlikely to be celebrated as the city where…)A binding deal will
have to wait
until 2010, perhaps at a mid-year meeting in Bonn or in December in Mexico City.

Kirsty Moore, first woman Red Arrows pilot, was inspired by her father
Red arrows: royal air force aerobatic team, the aerobatics display team of the royal air force of UK.
The first woman to become a Red Arrows pilot said today she had been inspired to join the RAF by her father.
Flight Lieutenant Kirsty Moore, 32, was speaking for the first time since she made history by joining the prestigious
aerobatics display team in September.
She paid tribute to
her father Robbie Stewart, a retired Tornado navigator. “My dad is immensely proud. He encouraged me to join the RAF,” she said. “He is one of those people who everyone loves and I keep on bumping into people who say they know him. Nobody has ever had a bad word to say about him.”
Flight Lieutenant Moore has completed two operational tours of Iraq with a Tornado squadron(n.海空陸三軍中隊)
based at RAF Marham in Norfolk and it was there that she first thought about joining the display team, which puts on 80-90 shows across the world every year.
She joined the RAF in 1998 after studying aeronautical engineering at Imperial College, London. She is been married to Nicky Moore, 34, who is still a flying instructor at RAF Valley.
Flight Lieutenant Moore said: “It’s an awesome job. To be told I had been selected was one of the best days of my life. It was incredible.
“The girl thing is an aside for me because I have been a female all my life and I’ve been a pilot since joining the RAF.
“I know for outsiders it is a big thing but for me it is about timing and someone was always going to be the first woman to join the Red Arrows. I’m lucky enough it’s happened to me and I’m very proud.
The flame-haired pilot said: “You can get ribbed for almost everything and the boys will pick up on anything so my hair colour gets a mention but as long as I’ve got something to come back with, then everything’s OK.”
Squadron Leader Ben Murphy, said she was selected for her calm personality as well as her skills as a pilot.
“It is a milestonefor the Red Arrows but, that said, we do have female aircrew in all our squadrons and this is a great way of getting the message across to women thinking of joining the Red Arrows,” he said.
“She is very calm under pressure but Red Arrow pilots also have to be able to do the job on the ground as well as the flying job and she has a very calm and level-headed(clinical/imperturbable/staid) approach.”

長安UID: 2573189

Economist. 03.17

Brazil
takes off
From The Economist print edition
Now the risk for Latin America’s big success story is hubris(n.驕傲)
WHEN, back in 2003, economists at Goldman Sachs
bracketed
Brazil with(bracket sth. With sth.=compare sth. With sth.)Russia, India and China as the economies that would come to dominate the world, there was much
sniping（=contempt）about the B in the BRIC acronym. Brazil? A country with a growth rate as
skimpy（deficient in supply）as its swimsuits,prey to（sth. easily harmed by）any financial crisis that was around, a place of chronic political instability, whose infinite capacity to
squander(waste. spendthrift.)
its obvious
potential
was as
legendary
as its talent for football and carnivals, did not seem to belong with those emerging titans(巨人gargoyle滴水嘴,奇形怪狀的人) (sentence: one’s capacity to squander potential was as legendary as…).
Now that scepticism looks
misplaced. China may be leading the world economy out of recession but Brazil is also on a roll(in the midst of a series of successes). It did not avoid the downturn(n.低迷時期), but was amongthe last in and the first out. Its economy is growing again at an annualised(yearly 年度的) rate of 5%. It should pick up more speed over the next few years as big new deep-sea oilfields come on stream, and as Asian countries still hunger for food and minerals from Brazil’s vast and bountiful land. Forecasts vary, but sometime in the decade after 2014—rather sooner than Goldman Sachs envisaged(v.正視，想象≠envision預見)—Brazil is likely to become the world’s fifth-largest economy, overtaking Britain and France. By 2025 S&atilde;o Paulo will be its fifth-wealthiest city, according to PwC, a consultancy.
And, in some ways, Brazil
outclasses
the other BRICs. Unlike China, it is a democracy. Unlike India, it has no insurgents, no ethnic and religious conflicts nor hostile neighbours. Unlike Russia, it exports more than oil and arms, and treats foreign investors with respect. Under the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former trade-union leader born in poverty, its government has moved to reduce the
searing(sear.v.燒焦;searing a.焦灼的)
(marked by extreme intensity, harshness, or emotional power) inequalities that have long disfigured(v.損壞，毀容destroy.≠deface損害) it. Indeed, when it comes to smart social policy and boosting consumption at home, the developing world has much more to learn from Brazil than from China. In short, Brazil suddenly seems to have
made an entrance onto the world stage. Its
arrival was symbolically
marked last month by the
award(注意:這裡用的是award而不是winning)
of the 2016 Olympics to Rio de Janeiro; two years earlier, Brazil will host football’s World Cup(Sentence: Its arrival was marked by the award of…).
At last, economic sense
In fact, Brazil’s emergence has been steady, not sudden. The first steps were taken in the 1990s when, having exhausted all other options, it
settled on(v.decide.選定we must settle on a place to meet.)
a sensible set of economic policies. Inflation was
tamed(v.馴服的), and spendthrift local and federal governments were required by law to
rein(n.馬韁v.控制) in their debts. The Central Bank was granted autonomy, charged with keeping inflation low and ensuring that banks eschew the adventurism(n.冒險主義) that has damaged Britain and America. The economy was thrown open to foreign trade and investment, and many state industries were privatised(v.privatize使變窮).
All this helpedspawn a troupe of
new and ambitious Brazilian multinationals (see ourspecial report). Some are formerly state-owned companies that are flourishing as a result of being allowed to operate at arm’s length from the government. That goes for the national oil company, Petrobras, for Vale, a mining giant, and Embraer, an aircraft-maker. Others are private firms, like Gerdau, a steelmaker, or JBS, soon to be the world’s biggest meat producer. Below them stands a new cohort(n.同黨同事) of nimble entrepreneurs,battle-hardened
by that bad old past. Foreign investment ispouring in, attracted by a market boosted by falling poverty and a
swelling
lower-middle class. The country has established some strong political institutions. A free and vigorous press uncovers corruption—though there is plenty of it, and it mostly goes unpunished.
Just as it would be a mistake to underestimate the new Brazil, so it would be to
gloss over(v.美化掩飾don't gloss over your fault.)
its weaknesses.(sentence: Just as it would be a mistake to …, so it would be to…) Some of these are depressingly familiar. Government spending is growing faster than the economy as a whole, but both private and public sectors still invest too little,
planting a question-mark overthose rosy growth forecasts. Too much public money is going on the wrong things. The federal government’s payroll has increased by 13% since September 2008. Social-security and pension spending rose by 7% over the same period although the population is relatively young. Despite recent improvements, education and infrastructure(n.基礎設施infracture不完全骨折) still lag behind China’s or South Korea’s (as a big power cut this week reminded Brazilians). In some parts of Brazil, violent crime is still rampant.
National champions and national handicapsThere are new problemson the horizon(is approaching.imminent ), just beyond those oil platforms offshore. The real has gained almost 50% against the dollar since early December. That boosts Brazilians’ living standards by making imports cheaper. But it makes life hard for exporters. The government last month imposed a tax on short-term capital inflows. But that is unlikely to stop the currency’s
appreciation（increase in value）, especially once the oil starts pumping.
Lula’s instinctive response to this dilemma is industrial policy. The government will require oil-industry supplies—from pipes to ships—to be produced locally. It is bossing Vale into building a big new steelworks. It is true that public policy helped to create Brazil’s industrial base. But privatisation and opennesswhipped this into shape(v.塑造in the rut≠hidebound). Meanwhile, the government is doing nothing to
dismantle
many of the obstacles to doing business—notably
the baroque rules on everything from paying taxes to employing people. Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s candidate in next October’s presidential election, insists that no reform of the archaic labour law is needed (seearticle).
And perhaps that is the biggest danger facing Brazil: hubris. Lula is right to say that his country deserves respect, just as he deserves much of the adulation he enjoys. But he has also been a lucky president,reaping
the rewards of the commodity boom and operating from the solid platform for growth erected by his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Maintaining Brazil’s improved performance in a world suffering harder times means that Lula’s successor will have to tackle some of the problems that he has felt able to ignore. So the outcome of the election may determine the speed with which Brazil advances in the post-Lula era. Nevertheless, the country’scourse
seems
to be set. Its take-off is
all the more
（更加）admirable because it has been achieved through reform and democratic consensus-building. If only China could say the same.
經濟學人最關心的就是中國的一黨專制獨裁統治。呵呵。

長安UID: 2573189

Economist. 03. 18

Barack Obama in Asia
The president pays Asia the compliment of courtesy; rewards are not immediate
IT TOOK Barack Obama nearly a year in office to get to East Asia. When he did, it was for an intensive nine-day obstacle course, which he tried to negotiate with the
placatory (撫慰懷柔的.designed to make sb feel less angry by showing that you are willing to satisfy or please them) charm andopenness to dialogue
that have marked his diplomacy. Unsurprisingly, it went down well, but produced little of substance(n.實質性成果).
The
centrepiece
(the most important, noticeable, or attractive part of something) of the trip was China, which he visited at acritical juncture
in the world’s most important bilateral relationship. China handled the visit with ambivalence(n.矛盾心情). It was keen to encourage Mr Obama’s friendly approach and his willingness to recognise China as a fellow great power. But it was also clearly nervous of a charismatic young president far better than China’s
standoffish
(somewhat cold and reserved) leaders at appealing to ordinary citizens (“voters”, as they are known in America). (句型：A is far better than B at doing sth.)
The courteous but rigidly formal reception afforded Mr Obamastood in sharp contrast
to that given the previous Democratic president to visit China, Bill Clinton, in 1998.Chinese television aired an interview with Mr Clinton andgave live coverage(n.實況報導)
to his meeting with Chinese students and to a joint press conference with President Jiang Zemin. With Mr Obama, Chinese officials were careful to limit opportunities for embarrassment. In Shanghai, Mr Obamastaged(v.上演，進行to produce or cause to happen for public view or public effect) what the Americans described as a “town hall” meeting with young Chinese. It was shown only on Shanghai television, along with a painfully slow
feed(n.v.慢進給.緩衝很慢)
relayed(傳播.老是記不得傳播怎么說，總結下：spread, sprawl,propaganda,disseminate: the use news paper to disseminate right-wing views. transmit: The world cup final is being transmitted live to over fifty countries.) through the internet.
Later, in Beijing, Mr Obama held a ritual meeting with reporters
alongside (alongside sb.和某人一起)President Hu Jintao. But unlike in 1998, no questions were allowed. Mr Hu grimly gripped(v.緊握) his lectern as Mr Obama delivered a statement in which he spoke of the universality of America’s human-rights values. Mr Obama did not, however, seem inclined to
goad his hosts
at a time,as he put it, when the bilateral relationship “has never been more important to our collective future”. The decade since Mr Clinton’s visit has seen a huge shift in the relative balance of power. China’s
hectic growth
has made it an indispensable partner both in
redressing(v.賠償救濟矯正) global economic imbalances
and in curbing carbon emissions
Mr Obama’s trip predictably failed to produce breakthroughs on either issue, though a lengthy joint statement outlined measures to
step up
(to increase the amount of an activity or the speed of a process in order to improve a situation) co-operation on developing clean energy. Mr Obama alluded to his hope that China’s exchange rate might become more market-driven, but there was no hint of agreement. One new area of co-operation is in outer space. The two countries declared a plan to open a dialogue on manned space flight, hitherto resisted by America because of the strong military links to China’s manned space programme.
The two sides announced that they would hold another dialogue on human rights by the end of February, their first such discussions in nearly two years. The dialogue has been
sputtering(v.噴濺，語無倫次地說)
on and off
for nearly 20 years. But as usual during American presidential visits, China this week tried to
keep
dissidentsout of sight. Several were reportedlyrounded up(v.逮捕after the murder, the police rounded up a few suspects. 也有合算的意思，DH里susan在超市遇到mrs. Huber,就說round up to me.記在我的賬上)
by the police before the trip.
Officials displayed similar nervousness in their preparations for the “town hall” meeting in Shanghai. Chinese participants werecoached
beforehand on how they should pose their questions. They were also carefully selected. Many were members of the Communist Youth League, an organisation that grooms(n.新郎馬夫v.有意培養) potential party members. America, Mr Obama said, would “always speak out” for its core principles. But as he also said, “more is to be gained when great powers co-operate than when they collide(v.碰撞抵觸)”.
Bow rowA similar concern for avoiding
head-on clashes
marked Mr Obama’s time in Tokyo on November 13th-14th. For
seething American nationalists, his only achievement there was to embarrass the nation by bowing to Emperor Akihito. There was all the customary talk-show outrage over what much of the rest of the world would view as a gesture of cultural courtesy.
The Japanese saw his trip differently. In Tokyo, Mr Obama made one of his main foreign-policy speeches so far,
laying out(v.計劃安排≠settle on決定)
(to arrange or plan a building, town, garden etc) his vision for America’s deeper engagement with Asia and styling himself as America’s first “Pacific president”.
Throughout, it was peppered with gushing references to Japan—delighting a country that fears it has fallen into China’s shadow.
This amounted to a well-crafted appeal to the Japanese people, in case the government they recently elected seeks to
put more distance between
their country and America. Yukio Okamoto, a former special adviser to two Japanese prime ministers, thought the visit “brilliant”, in “consolidating the popular feeling that the United States is a friend to Japan”.
The potentialstrains in America’s relationship with Japan are easy to see. The biggest is the fate of an American helicopter base on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa. The new government of Yukio Hatoyama, the prime minister, is keen to review a bilateral agreement reached in 2006 that would relocate the base within Okinawa.The Obama administration believes the treaty should largelystand(繼續).In Tokyo Mr Obama and Mr Hatoyama promised to “move expeditiously” to
settle the matter. On November 17th the two governments began high-level talks, which officials privately said were aimed at reaching agreement this year.Yet Mr Hatoyama has made clear that he does notunderstand
the word “expeditiously”
to bind him
to a specific timescale(n.時間量程)(understand sth to be:to accept something as having a particular meaning.也就是说，日本首相不认为“快速”这个词使他受到时间安排的束缚。是一种特殊的用法). This puts himat oddsnot just with the Americans, but with his own foreign minister, Katsuya Okada, who is taking part in the high-level talks.
As soon as Mr Obama had left Japan, Mr Okada travelled to Okinawa to see for himself how the islanders view the base treaty. Mr Hatoyama is likely to be sensitive to the feelings of Okinawans, many of whom oppose it and want the helicopters moved off the island altogether. But mainland Japanese may now be more sympathetic to(inclined to傾向，贊同) the treaty, especially having
heard from Mr Obama’s own lips
how important he believes it is for America’s—and Japan’s—security.
From Japan Mr Obama flew to Singapore, for a regional summit in need of reassurance about America’s renewed commitment to Asia and the Pacific. He attended a meeting of South-East Asian leaders that included Myanmar’s prime minister—the first such high-level contact with the Burmese junta in four decades.

There is no pariah(n.賤民minion) it seems, with whom Mr Obama is not prepared to risk dialogue—even North Korea, which has long hankered after the kudos of bilateral talks with America.
But the willingness of his administration to talk to Kim Jong Il’s nuclear-armed thugs(n.暴徒，刺客) jangles(n.v.刺耳，爭吵) some nerves in South Korea, the last stop on Mr Obama’s Asian tour. There is also frustration in Seoul that a free-trade agreement between the two countries
languishes(fail)
in America’s Congress. Differences, however, werebrushed aside(v.不管不顧)
during Mr Obama’s visit. South Korea is probably not too alarmed at Mr Obama’s penchant for conciliation. It knows that Mr Kim is a
past-master(I am a paster master at bridge.我是個橋牌高手paster master不是先王的意思，而是“高手”).

Obama訪華，在上海的講話都沒有看到。想也想得到，是CCP一手操控的。沒勁。

長安UID: 2573189

Economist.03.19

The long, winding road to the Republican nomination
PRESIDENTIAL hopefuls find a natural habitat in Iowa. Before the caucuses(民權大會), this energetic species can be seen marching in parades and munching(masticate.大聲咀嚼guzzle) pies at county fairs. Some, however, can be spotted by keen watchers a lot earlier than others. On November 7th Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota’s governor, gave the keynote speech at the Iowa Republicans’ annual autumn dinner. “Are you fired up?” he asked the crowd, echoing the young long-shot of 2008. “Are you ready to fight back?”
The answer, apparently, is not quite yet. In a field of veterans such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, Mr Pawlenty lags far behind. Seventy-two percent of respondents in a recent poll had no opinion of him at all. This has a least one advantage: Mr Pawlenty is a fresh face. Now his camp is trying to fashion him into the future of the party. But with Republicans in turmoil(n.騷動混亂), Mr Pawlenty is proving just how difficult the road to 2012 will be.
Mr Pawlenty is in some ways a natural antidote(n.解毒藥) to Barack Obama. He is young, just 48 years old (the same age as the president), and like him he has a compelling personal history. The son of a truck driver, he rose through the state legislature before winning the governor’s office in 2002. He is evangelical(福音教派的), anti-abortion and pro-gun, but manages to be all those things without appearing as abrasive(n.磨料a.粗暴) as Mrs Palin. Most important, he describes himself as a fervent fiscal hawk(不主張國家控制財政的≠deficit hawk). He has refused to raise state taxes, which Democrats say will leave Minnesota with gaping shortfalls(n.差額). This year he slashed programmes from the budget unilaterally, a move being challenged in court. However, though Minnesota’s liberal voters may not like all of the governor’s policies, they do like “T-Paw”.
Mr Pawlenty is coy about his ambitions, but he is plainly looking beyond Minnesota’s borders. On October 1st he formed a political action committee with a suitably bland(a.corny) name (Freedom First) and a benign premise(electing other conservatives). He has become one of cable television’s most talkative heads. The speech in Iowa followed a big fund-raiser; Mr Pawlenty is now off to Florida and New Hampshire. All this is supposed to build a base of support. But there is also room for disaster.
In the era of tea-party conservatives, Mr Pawlenty is calculatedly
veering(v.轉變方向) to the right. Speaking to The Economist in St Paul, Minnesota, he recently explained that the earth might be warming, but that it is unclear “to what extent that is the result of natural causes.” After a blog called him “milquetoast (n.coward意志薄弱的膽小之人)
establishment” for not endorsing a conservative candidate in New York over a moderate Republican, Mr Pawlenty hastily endorsed the conservative. A Democrat won the race. On November 3rd he questioned Olympia Snowe’s place within the Republican Party. He later called Ms Snowe, a moderate senator, to apologize.
Despite these swings(波動.fluctuation), Mr Pawlenty insists that the best path to power is to uphold conservative tenets. “It’s about trying to convince Democrats and independents to join us because our views, our ideas, our values are hopefully attractive to them.” But the governor has his work cut out. “My base?” he asked in St Paul, and pointed to an aide(n.助手副官) and his dog.

長安UID: 2573189

Economist.03.20
The decline of music piracy(n.盜竊=plagiarize;plagiarism) holds lessons for other industries
YOU open a window on your computer’s screen. You type in the name of a
cheesy(a.不值錢的低劣的cheap)
song from the 1980s. A list of results appears. You double-click on one of them, and within a few seconds the song is playing.This is what it was like to
use Napstera decade ago; and it is also how
Spotify, another free online-music service,
works today. The difference? Napster was an illegal file-sharing service that was
shut down by the courts. Spotify,by contrast, is an entirely legal, free service supported by advertising. This shows how much things have changed
in the world of（在某个领域中~）online music in the past decade. It also explains why online music piracy may at last bein decline.
For most of the past decade the music industry focused on
litigation（诉讼）
to try to prevent piracy. Over the years the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has accused 18,000 internet users of engaging in illegal file-sharing. Most of them
settled, though two cases went to court this year. In both cases the
defendants (a single mother and a student) lost and were ordered to pay damages (of $1.92m and $675,000respectively).But the industry has realised that such cases encourage the publication of embarrassing headlines more than they discourage piracy（比喻用得超赞~，encourage the publication of embarrassing headlines来代替various case concerning illegal file-sharing）, for as each network was shut down, another would
sprout(v.發芽生長)
in its place.
Yet
as piracy
flourished on illegal networks, legal
alternatives
also started to appear. Apple
launched its iTunes Music Store, offering downloads at $0.99 per track, in 2003. Many others have followed, including a new,above-board
version of
Napster. And in the past two years new music sites and services haveproliferated. Spotifyoffers free, advertising-supported
streams（又是很漂亮的比喻~用stream来比喻源泉~）; paying customers are spared the ads and can use the service on
smart-phones(n.智能手機smart還有乾淨，痛苦的意思). Nokia’s Comes With Music scheme includes a year’s unlimited downloads in the price of some mobile phones. TDC, a Danish telecoms operator,
bundles(一捆一束，匆忙打發) access to a music service with its
broadband
packages.
All of these different, legal music services offer the “celestial
jukebox(n.自動電唱機the jukebox grounds out an incessant stream of pop music.)”—whatever you want, right away, from the internet—that made Napster so compelling when it appeared on the scene. True, revenue from these services will be less than from CD sales, but it is much better than nothing. The recorded-music industry will get smaller—but it will not disappear.
That is because there is growing evidence that this
plethora
of new services
adds up to an attractive alternative to
piracy for many (see article). In June a poll of Swedish users of file-sharing software found that 60% had cut back or stopped using it; of those, half had switched to advertising-supported streaming services like Spotify. In Denmark, over 40% of subscribers to TDC’s broadband-plus-music package also said they were making fewer illegal downloads as a result. In a British poll published in July, 17% of consumers said they used file-sharing services, down from 22% in December 2007. Music executives
reckon
people are moving from file-sharing networks to Spotify, though they may continue to download some music illegally.
To be sure, the carrots of more attractive legal services are being accompanied by innovative forms of stick.（很好的比喻，carrot和stick）In particular,
a new approach called “graduated response” isgaining momentum(在積蓄力量). As its name indicates, it involves
ratcheting
up(v.漸漸加速ratchet,漸進) the pressure on users of file-sharing software by sending them warnings by e-mail and letter and then cutting off or
throttling(v.掐，使窒息)
their internet
accessif they fail to respond after three requests. Graduated-response laws were introduced earlier this year in Taiwan and South Korea, and were enacted in France last month. Other countries are expected to follow suit.
But mainly carrots
Yet in Britain music file-sharing seems to be in decline even though a graduated-response law has yet to be introduced. The country also boasts one of the broadest selections of legal music services: Spotify and Comes With Music were both launched there before most other countries, and two of Britain’s biggest internet-service providers have borrowed TDC’s bundled-music model. This suggests that when it comes to discouraging music piracy, carrots may in fact be more important than sticks.
All of this
offers a lesson for other typesof media, such as films and video games. Piracy thrives because it
satisfies an unmet demand.
The best way to discourage it is to offer a diverse range of attractive, legal alternatives. The music industry has taken a decade to work this out, but it has now done so. Other industries should
benefit from its experience—and follow its example.

長安UID: 2573189

Economist.03.21

Patients spreading drug-resistant swine flu strain
A form of swine flu(n.豬流感) that is resistant to antiviral drugs(n.抗病毒藥) has begun spreading between hospital patients in Wales, health officials said.
A strain that appears resistant to Tamiflu, the most common treatment has infected five patients at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. All of them had serious underlying health conditions.
One patient apparently developed resistance to the antiviral drug and the strain was then passed on to others, the National Public Health Service for Wales (NPHS) said. The case is thought to be the first time in Europe that a drug-resistant strain has passed between people.
Two of the five patients have recovered and been discharged(=release放出卸下解除) from hospital, one is in critical care and two are being treated on the ward. Britain has bought enough doses of Tamiflu, which can shorten the duration of swine flu and reduce the risk of complications, for half of the population.
There have been several dozen reports around the world of people developing resistance to Tamiflu, but there has been only one case of person-to-person transmission(傳播，傳染) of a Tamiflu-resistant strain, between two people at a summer camp in the United States.
The Department of Health said that it was taking the cases seriously, but added that the risk to the general population was low.
“The Tamiflu-resistant virus has emerged in a group of particularly vulnerable individuals . . . these patients are known to be at increased risk of developing resistance to the drug, a spokesman for the Department of Health said.
“Our strategy to offer antivirals to all patients with swine flu is the right one — to help prevent complications and reduce the severity of the illness.”
The NPHS said that the resistant strain did not appear more severe than the virus circulating since the spring. All patients have been tested and those with the resistant strain have been given other antivirals.
Dr Roland Salmon, director of the NPHS Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre, said: “The emergence of influenza A viruses that are resistant to Tamiflu is not unexpected in patients with serious underlying conditions and suppressed immune systems, who still test positive for the virus despite treatment.
“In this case, the resistant strain of swine flu does not appear to be any more severe than the swine flu virus that has been circulating since April. For the vast majority of people, Tamiflu has proved effective in reducing the severity of illness.
“Vaccination remains the most effective tool we have in preventing swine flu so I urge people identified as being at risk to look out for their invitation to be vaccinated by their GP surgery.”

AdelineShenUID: 2630498

赞啊。。。我也要加油了！！~~

長安UID: 2573189

嗯，一起加油啊！20天后我們再相會～～

Economist.03.22

Turning the screw some more

A UN report suggests that striking progress is being made in the fight against AIDS
ALL epidemics run their course. AIDS will be no exception. But
concerted
action can give them a helping hand to the finish line, and
the latest report from the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS, the
two United Nations agencies charged with tackling(dealing with) the epidemic, claims
that is what is happening.
The most important figure in the report, which was published onTuesday November 24th, is 17%. This is the estimated drop(slash.v) in the annualnumber of new infections compared with 2001, the year that the United
Nations Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS was signed. The biggest
proportionate fall(看得出經濟學人的嚴謹性，proportionate fall即下降的百分比。而不是單純指人數), 25%, has been in East Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa,where the disease is most rampant, the decline is estimated at 15%.That corresponds to 400,000 fewer African infections in 2008 than in2001, though 1.9m Africans are still becoming infected each year.
The death rate is also falling, as antiretroviral drugs becomeubiquitous. Over the five years to 2008, the report claims, the numberof AIDS-related deaths around the world fell by 10%, though it still
stands at about 2m annually.
A consequence of the falling death rate, of course, is that there
are more infected people who need treatment(大難不死但醫療也很驚人). The number of those“living with HIV”, to use the politically correct argot(cant.隱語) of the field,is somewhere between 31m and 36m. Not all of these people need drugs
immediately, but almost all will need them eventually(跟前面那句感覺很像). Since the drugs
prolong life, but do not cure, the rising number of infected people
will provide a challenge to(provide a challenge...第一次看到這樣表達,好像pose a challenge更常見) the pockets of rich-world taxpayers, the
principal source of funds for these drugs in the poorest parts of the
world.
It is not clear how much the falling number of new infections is a
result of the activities of the agencies that distribute those funds,and the governments they support, in chivvying people to change their
behaviour. The report talks of the benefits of integrating HIV
prevention and treatment programmes with other health and
social-welfare services, and other such fine phrases, but the direct
consequences of such things are hard to measure. What is clear, though,is that the spread of the drugs themselves has been crucial to
prevention as well as treatment. In particular, the strategic
deployment(n.部署展開the infantry deploys at dawn.部署在deploy) of antiretrovirals to pregnant women has, the report
estimates, stopped some 200,000 mother-to-child infections(親子傳染) in the 12
years to 2008.
As to the cause of the drop in the adult infection rate, that is
less certain. In this case, too, the drugs may be important. Although
antiretroviral drugs do not cure the user, they cause the level of the
virus in his body to drop to a point where it is harmless—and also
unlikely to be passed on to sexual partners.The report quotes research
suggesting that those on the drugs are only a tenth as likely to
transmit the virus as those who are not.
The bad news—no report on AIDS would be complete without some—is
that there is evidence of a long-feared generalisation of the epidemicin some parts of the world where it has hitherto been confined to
groups at special risk. It appears that the risky groups, such as
intravenous(n.靜脈注射的)
drug users, and prostitutes
and their clients, are starting
to spread the virus, through sex, to others. This is particularly true
in the case of drug users for eastern Europe and Central Asia, and for
prostitutes’ clients in other parts of Asia. The overall message,though, is cautiously optimistic. AIDS may not yet be in full retreat,
but progress is being made.

長安UID: 2573189

Economist.03.23

PRESIDENT Barack Obama, on his first visit to China this week, urged the government to allow its currency to rise. President Hu Jintao politely chose to ignore him. In recent weeks Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, have also called for a stronger yuan. But China will adjust its currency only when it sees fit, not in response to foreign pressure.

China allowed the yuan to rise by 21% against the dollar in the three years to July 2008, but since then it has more or less kept the rate fixed. As a result, the yuan’s trade-weighted value(n.貿易加權價值) has been dragged down(v.拖垮drag,拖) this year by the sickly(蒼白無力病態的) dollar, while many other currencies have soared. Since March the Brazilian real and the South Korean won have gained 42% and 36%
respectively against the yuan,seriously
eroding(腐蝕)
those
countries’
competitiveness.

Speculation about a change in China’s currency policy increased in the week before Mr Obama’s visit, after the People’s Bank of China tweak(v.扭拉the father gave the boy a painful tweak)ed the usual wording in its quarterly monetary-policy report. It dropped a phrase about keeping the yuan “basically stable” and added that foreign-exchange policy will take into account “international capital flows and changes in major currencies”. But exchange-rate policy is decided by the State Council, not the central bank. And many policymakers, notably in the Ministry of Commerce, do not favour a revaluation right now.

Indeed, Chinese officials have become bolder in standing up to(v.withstand忍受禁住this cloth is designed to stand up to a lot of wear and tear.) Washington. “We don’t think that it’s good for the world economic recovery, and it is also unfair, that you ask others to appreciate while you depreciate your own currency,” said a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce on November 16th. The previous day Liu Mingkang, China’s chief banking
regulator,
blasted(blast.n.爆破一陣強風blasted,被咒的，殺千刀的the Apollo blasted off at noon正午發射;Frost blasted the blossom.凋零;You blasted idiot!殺千刀的白癡)
Washington for its low interest rates and for the falling dollar, which, he claimed, was encouraging a dollar carry trade and global asset-price bubbles. He strangely ignored the fact that China’s own overly lax(過度鬆弛的lax=loose) monetary policy, partly the result of its fixed exchange rate, is fuelling bubbles in shares and property.
Foreigners argue that a stronger yuan would not only help reduce global imbalances, such as America’s trade deficit, but would also benefit China. It would help China regain control of its monetary policy. By pegging to the dollar (peg=clinch釘牢=stick to), it is, in effect, importing America’s monetary policy, which is too loose for China’s fast growing economy. A stronger yuan would also help rebalance China’s economy, making it less dependent on exports, putting future growth
on a more sustainable path.

If a stronger exchange rate is
in China’s own interest, why does it resist? Beijing rejects the accusation that its exchange-rate policy has given it an unfair advantage. It is true that other emerging-market currencies have risen sharply this year, but this ignores the full picture. Last year China held its currency steady against the dollar throughout the global financial crisis, while others tumbled. Since the start of 2008, the yuan has actually risen against every currency except the yen.

Beijing also argues that it has done a lot to help global rebalancing. Thanks to its monetary and fiscal stimulus, domestic demand has contributed an incredible 12 percentage points to GDP growth this year, while net exports subtracted almost four percentage points. Its current-account surplus has almost halved(v.減半the twins halved everything平分) to around 6% of GDP from 11% in 2007. Chinese policymakers accept that the yuan needs to appreciate over the longer term, but say now is the wrong time, because exports are still falling, by 14% over the past 12 months.

Another reason for hesitation is that the theory that revaluing the yuan will allow Beijing to tighten its monetary policy is too simplistic(a.過分簡單化的). China’s experience since 2005 shows that a gradual rise encourages investors to bet on further appreciation; hot-money inflows then swell domestic liquidity. A large one-off(a.n.一次性once for all) increase might work, as it would stem(起源) expectations of a further rise. But the sort of increase required—perhaps 25%—is politically unacceptable because it would put many exporters out of business overnight.

Some Chinese economists warn that the benefits to America from yuan revaluation are much exaggerated. In particular, a stronger yuan would not significantly reduce America’s trade deficit. There is little overlap between American and Chinese production, so American goods cannot replace Chinese imports. Instead, consumers would simply end up paying more for imports either from China or other producers, such as Vietnam. This would be like imposing a tax on American consumers.

These arguments help explain why China is dragging its feet. Nevertheless, in the long run, a stronger yuan would benefit China’s economy—and the world’s—by helping shift growth from investment and exports towards consumption. It would boost consumers’ purchasing power and squeeze corporate profits, which have accounted for most of the increase in China’s excessive domestic saving in recent years. China will probably allow the yuan to start rising again early next year. This will not be the result of foreign lobbying(lobby大廳門廊，引申：遊說)—indeed, China is more likely to change its policy if foreign policymakers shut up. But by early next year China’s exports should be growing again, its year-on-year GDP growth could be close to 10%, and its inflation rate will have turned positive. The arguments in favour of revaluation will then loom(n.織布機heirloom傳家寶；若隱若現；v.迫近on the horizon) much larger.

長安UID: 2573189

Economist.03.24

DELEGATES turning up to the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—known as the Copenhagen conference—face a fortnight(n.兩周the play folded within a fortnight.那出話劇演了2周就停了) of negotiation, beginning on Monday December 7th, almost as rich in complexity as in hyperbole. The range of different possibilities in the negotiations means that there is, potentially, something for everyone, which raises hopes for success. At the same time, there is the near certainty(幾乎是必然的a near certainty of disappointment) of almost everyone being disappointed to some extent.
The conference has two different sets of aims, which may well be united into one road forward by the end. One set of negotiations is on the Kyoto protocol(n.外交禮儀;草案協議). The protocol, negotiated in 1997, entered into force(became effective) in 2005 and imposes targets for carbon-emission reductions on developed countries for the period 2008 to 2012. It imposes no obligations on developing countries, but did set up the clean development mechanism (CDM) by which developed countries could meet commitments by reducing emissions in developing countries, transferring capital in their direction in the process. One track of the Copenhagen negotiations deals with the requirement under Kyoto to agree terms for a second commitment period after 2012, with new and tougher levels of emission reductions dealt with in the existing regime(=extant government).
The other main track of negotiation is on “long-term co-operative action”—finding a way to a new protocolthat would involve commitments of some sort from developing countries. Many richer countries are keen that these negotiations should produce something along these lines to replace the ongoing Kyoto commitments. Many poorer countries are not so keen, and want any new agreement to sit alongside new legally binding (though not necessarily legally enforceable) limits negotiated under Kyoto.
As delegates began speaking, they largely restated old positions. A Sudanese
representative,speaking for the poor Group of 77 countries and China,excoriated the rich world’s unwillingness to put up more money for the poor ones,
for
example. In the run up to the conference, various countries have staked out their positions. America, which has not ratified Kyoto, has offered emissions cuts that would take it 3% below 1990 levels by 2020. The EU is offering at least a 20% cut with respect to(至於with respect to your enquiry, I enclosed an explanatory leaflet) 1990 levels, and says it is willing to go up to 30% as part of an ambitious deal. Overall, developed countries are offering reductions of about 16% compared with 1990.
Some poorer countries, such as South Africa, are also offering proposed emission reductions, though they will not necessarily be willing to have them made binding. A lot of these depend on payments from developed countries that will help developing countries to slow deforestation and other land-use changes which emit carbon dioxide. A deal on these payments, which goes by the name of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, which becomes REDD+ if conservation issues are added to the mix), is a high priority for environmental organisations and the countries which stand to benefit.
The largest developing-world emitters, China and India, are offering cuts to the “carbon intensity” of their economies—the amount of carbon emitted per dollar of GDP. For an historically fast-growing(空前快速) country like China, a large cut in intensity (40% below 2005 levels by 2020) is quite compatible with continuing growth in absolute emissions.
According to an eve-of-conference update by Nicholas Stern, a British economist, the various offers on the table would, if enacted, add up to about 80% of the reductions required for a good chance of keeping overall global warming to 2°C. Bigger cuts would make the chances of such an outcome better. But the provisos and conditions attached to the current offers will make for high hurdles. Some of the most contentious problems surround the hundreds of billions of dollars that poorer countries want transferred from richer ones to cover the costs of reduced emissions and adaptation to the changes that are already inevitable; how much money might be offered, and by what mechanisms, is an important negotiating point. Kyoto's CDM mechanism was not designed for such flows, and may well need reform even if other channels open up.
There is all but universal agreement that the negotiations will not end in a new protocol, or a binding extension of the old protocol. What they might provide is the outline of a deal on most of the important issues that could be turned into a legal protocol early next year; Copenhagen could, though, provide considerably less than that.

長安UID: 2573189

Economist.03.25

DESPITE the gloomytalk that preceded the UN climate conference, the opening was upbeat(n.上升upswing;a.樂觀的sanguine). Most big countries had vowed to cut or limit emissions during the previous few weeks. As delegates arrived, America’s Environmental Protection Agency
announced that carbon-dioxide emissions were an “endangerment(n.危害)” to health. This allows Barack Obama to regulate them, whatever Congress does.
The happiness did not last. On December 8th a
draft agreement which had been discussed some weeks ago was leaked to the Guardian,a British newspaper. It caused a furore(n.躁動=sensation). The “Danish text” had been circulated by the hosts, but not to all parties; and it seems to confirm the futility of moves towards the legally binding treaty that many still want.
It also seems to link any rich-to-poor transfers of money to specific actions taken by developing countries to curb emissions. Embarrassed Danes said the text was one of several unofficial papers that had been floated, not a basis for real bargaining. The lead negotiator for the “G77 plus China” group of developing countries, Lumumba Di-Aping, was unsoothed(restive). “This text…is a major violation that threatens the success of the Copenhagen negotiations,” he fumed(v.冒煙,引申為生氣地說), saying two years’ work had been swept aside(sweep aside扔至一邊置之不理).
Can there still be a deal? The main obstacle may not be emissions cuts, which will not change much, but the closely linked issues of the shape of a deal and how much money it involves.
Everyone agrees that poorer countries, including India and China, need cash for climate “mitigation(n.緩和mitigate=assuage=concilliate)”—adopting green technology and new approaches to land use and forest conservation—and for “adaptation”: coping with the anticipated effects of climate change, some of which (like a degree of sea level rise) look unavoidable. America has joined the list of countries accepting such transfers, saying it will pay its “fair share”. Rich countries have talked of a “quick start” fund. The leaked Danish text has it starting in 2010-12 at a value to be determined; the UN has suggested $10 billion. To poor countries, this sounds paltry(pittance,nugatory微不足道): responses range from “bribery” to “it will not even pay for the coffins”. Instead, the G77 has asked for 0.5% to 1% of the rich countries’ GDPs. That implies hundreds of billions of dollars on top of existing development aid. The idea that rich countries will hand over1.2% to1.7% of their wealth in perpetuity(永久) is not going to fly.Some transfers occur already. Rich states meet emissions targets by paying poor countries to do the cutting, under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism. This system is under fire(under attack) in Copenhagen for being too choosy or too arbitrary in the projects it backs. It is also too small: it abates(v.緩和減少) only 330m tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, and billions of tonnes must be cut.
On Thursday, George Soros, a philanthropist, proposed turning on a much bigger tap: he wants a new use of Special Drawing Rights, effectively the IMF’s in-house gold-backed “currency”, mainly held by the rich countries. The IMF extended an extra $153 billion to rich countries last year to help them with the financial crisis. Most of it was unused. Mr Soros wants rich countries to lend $100 billion-worth to poor ones, creating a “green fund” to jump-start(v.啟動) mitigation. The IMF’s gold reserves could pay the (small) interest amounts that poor countries would otherwise owe.
Other proposals abound. The REDD initiative on forestry should move lots of money to countries which avoid felling trees. If emissions from ships and aircraft are cut, using a tax or an emissions market, that could provide cash. Less promisingly, France wants a levy on financial transactions. And the European Climate Foundation, a think-tank, says more could be taken from existing carbon markets: cash could be winkled(winkle.v.挖掘挑出)from traders who arbitrage the price difference between green projects in poor places and the “allocation” paid by rich-world emitters.
The question of who gets paid what, and how, feeds back into the main issue in these and inevitable future talks: to what extent will obligations under the Kyoto protocol be extended beyond the developed countries to developing ones? Rich countries account for most of the past emissions that now fill the air, but less than half the world’s current emissions.
Settling this question will mean some differentiation between developing countries, a term that includes both industrial giants and hapless(倒霉的unlucky) victims, whose interests are very different. Some people think this was the reason for the leaking of the Danish text. Those most offended by it are the smallest, weakest countries, which are vulnerable and emit very little. They are more interested in strong action than in who pays for it or who has to make the cuts. The calculus is different for the larger, more industrialised emerging markets, at least four of which—Brazil, India, South Africa and China—saw the text before it was leaked. They have more to gain from keeping the onus of action and payment on the developed world alone.
These countries have produced their own draft document, which would absorb any new agreement into the existing Kyoto framework. If the leak serves to firm up(undergird) resistance to a deal that spreads the duties of reduction wider, China and other large developing states may be the gainers.