1010G【fish】COMMENTS

HYPS2011UID: 2618437

A debate on burqas

Liberté v fraternité
France contemplates banning burqas
May 11th 2010 | PARIS | From The Economist online
HOW likely are French parliamentarians to approve the proposed “burqa ban”? Deputies get their first chance to debate the idea in parliament on Tuesday May 11th. As a first step, the National Assembly will examine a resolution, which carries symbolic value, but not legal force. Yet it will be a good test of the political mood. It is likely to be approved with thunderous cross-party support.
parliamentarians:议员Thunderous:雷鸣般的 which carries symbolic value, but not legal force
French backing(好词) for a burqa ban across the political spectrum is sometimes hard to understand. In many multicultural quarters of Europe, the idea is linked to the extreme or nationalist right. In Britain, for instance, the only party proposing a total burqa ban during the recent general-election campaign was the United Kingdom Independence Party, which also wants to pull the country out of the European Union. The far-right British National Party also called for a burqa ban in schools. One Labour minister replied that it was “not British” to tell people what to wear in the street. In a speech in Cairo last year, President Barack Obama argued that Western countries should not be “dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear”.
backing:支持
In France, however, the proposal draws backing from the mainstream left and right. President Nicolas Sarkozy, from the political right, said last year that the burqa, as the French call it (in reality, they mean the niqab, or all-over face-covering veil), was “not welcome” on French soil. Jean-François Copé, the leader of the ruling UMP party in parliament, has been the most active in pushing for a total ban (The Economistinterviewed Mr Copé last week). Yet the idea is also backed by politicians of all stripes, including the Communist head of a parliamentary inquiry into a ban, and various leading Socialists.
stripes :
One reason for this is France’s tradition of laïcité, a strict form of secularism, enshrined by law since 1905, and which keeps religion out of public institutions. At the time, the anti-clericalism behind the movement was largely inspired by the political left, and this legacy informs much left-wing thinking on secular matters today. When the French right proposed a ban on the headscarf (and other “conspicuous” religious symbols) in state schools in 2004, for example, the left voted massively in favour. The Socialist Party is expected to vote in favour of this week’s parliamentary resolution.
Enshrine:放置或保存于….anti-clericalism：反教权主义 headscarf:女人用的头巾

Unlike the headscarf ban, however, the upcoming law against the wearing of the burqa is not couched in terms of secularism. When a ban was first mooted, it was assumed that the legal basis for it would be French laïcité. Politicians soon realised, though, that to use this argument would be to accept that the burqa is a religious prescription of Islam. Most Muslim opinion-makers in France, including the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), an official body, and female Muslim ministers, such as Fadela Amara, reject this. The CFCM has clearly stated its “opposition to the practice on national territory”, although it also argues that a ban would stigmatise Islam.
句子间的标点分割学习：Most Muslim opinion-makers in France, including the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), an official body, and female Muslim ministers, such as Fadela Amara, reject this.Instead, the French are considering two grounds for outlawing the burqa, each of which—unlike laïcité—could potentially be applied in other countries. One is security, and the need to be identifiable at all times. The other is “dignity” and “equality between men and women”. Although very few women in France cover their faces—no more than 2,000, according to official estimates—it is a new trend. Politicians and researchers say that the wearing of the headscarf by French Muslims, many of whom are of North African origin where there is no tradition of covering the face, is a sign of manipulation by hardline Islamic radicals keen to test the French state. The French are unapologetic about wanting to reassert “the values of the republic” by going ahead with a ban.
句子：many of whom are of North African origin  be+of
How it would be applied in practice remains unclear. As it is, the Conseil d’Etat, the highest administrative court, has expressed worries about the legal grounds for a ban. If passed, Mr Copé says that it will apply not only to French Muslims, but to visitors from the Middle East too. Would such women be fined while doing their shopping on the Champs-Elysées? How can the government be sure that a woman is wearing the burqa under orders from her menfolk? Would it not lead to their further isolation, as they felt unable to venture out of the home? If that were indeed the upshot, it would be paradoxical for a law designed in part to ensure equality for women.
Upshot:结果 paradoxical:自相矛盾的 in part 在某种程上

梦想在路上UID: 2812986

COMMENT[1-2]

Executive education and the over-55s
Never too old to learnOlder executives are shunning corporate training. This is a problem both for them and the firms they work for【executive----主管，高级行政人员，行政部门】【shun----避开，回避，避免】
May 12th 2010 | From The Economist online
“LIFELONG learning” is a phrase beloved by business schools. But not, it seems, by their clients. According to a recent survey by Mannaz, a management-development firm, the number of professionals taking part in formal corporate training drops rapidly after the age of 55. Are these wise, old heads being overlooked?
It is tempting to conclude that older executives are falling victim to age discrimination, as firms focus resources on younger talent. But according to Jorgen Thorsell, Mannaz’s vice-president, this is not the case. Reticence, he says, comes not from
the organisations but from the employees themselves.
【Reticence----沉默寡言】
Mr Thorsell believes that conventional training simply no longer serves their needs. Formal programmes are often seen as a repetition of lessons already learned and become increasingly irrelevant in the light of
experience and expertise. The resulting “training fatigue” is resistant to most incentives.
【in the light of----鉴于，由于，按照，根据】【fatigue----疲劳，劳累】
【is resistant to----对……有抵抗力的】
This doesn’t mean that more seasoned executives have completely abandoned the idea of personal and career development, however. Instead Mr Thorsell says that this group
prefers a do-it-yourself approach, conducting their own research and swapping
war stories with their peers
rather than take a place at business school.
【seasoned----调过味的，成熟的老练的】【swap----交换】
Manager, teach thyself【thyself----你本人你自己（加强语气用=yourself）】
This autodidactic approach carries two potential dangers. The first is that a wealth of knowledge and experience is lost from the classroom, which reduces the value of the training for everyone else. But non-participation may also be the beginning of a process of detachment from the organisation, its aims and aspirations, which in time will damage both parties.【在这里是什么成分，整句如何理解？？？】
Furthermore, Stephen Burnett, associate dean of executive education at the Kellogg School of Management close to Chicago, says that as executives start to stretch their careers into their seventies, education makes even more sense for this group.
【autodidactic----自学者，自学成功者；didactic----教学的教导的，指人学究式的】【detachment----超脱，分离，拆卸】【dean----学院院长，系主任】【stretch----伸展，延伸】
One solution is to throw money at the problem. When senior managers are offered the chance to mix with their peers at a top business school, rather than a bog-standard institution, they seem to be quickly won over. IMD in Switzerland, for example, maintains that it does not see any drop in the number of older managers on its programmes, and goes on to say that it has actually witnessed organisations investing heavily in them【them指代？】 throughout the downturn. 【and后半句不理解？？？】
【bog-standard----俚
普通的，无新意的】
Few organisations could afford to put all of their veteran managers through the sort of prestigious programmes that IMD offers. But firms do need to engage those managers below the C-suite—what one management consultant describes as the “magnificent middle”—because these are the front-liners who make things happen within any business and who carry around in their heads the secrets of how the organisation works.
【veteran----经验丰富的人，老兵】
One way in which this can be done is to make training less about abstract theory and more about the actual workplace. This means steering clear of the case studies that business schools are so fond of and instead relating new ideas directly to what is happening on a day-to-day basis within the organisation. To accomplish this, training should be delivered in short, sharp bursts so that executives can take a lesson, put it into practice, assess its effectiveness and then return to shape it further in light of this “trial by fire”.【好排比！学】
【steering clear of----避开，绕开】【be fond of----喜爱，爱好】
Henry Mintzberg from McGill University in Canada, a high-profile champion of the middle manager, takes this approach one step further. He believes the best way to win over this group is to get them to train themselves. His “Coaching Ourselves” organisation brings experienced executives together for 90 minutes at a time. Managers are supplied with learning guides but not teachers. The emphasis is also unashamedly Luddite【整句什么意思？】. Laptops, BlackBerrys and the like are discouraged in favour of
old-fashioned pen and paper. “They discuss and reflect on how the topic impacts on them,” says Mr Minztberg. “[The managers] learn from each other and, most crucially, develop actions for their workplaces.”
【high-profile----高调，知名度高的，高姿态】【one step further----进一步】【win over----赢得……支持赞同】
Whatever approach an organisation takes to embrace its veterans, an ageing population means that it must do something, or else face the much more serious problem of how to replace them and their valuable knowledge in the near future. Unfortunately teaching an old dog the value of lifelong learning is notoriously tricky.
【tricky----复杂的棘手的，狡猾的】

azure9UID: 2789030

【COMMENT】3-1

The Supreme Court
Cracking the Kagan code
Barack Obama knows Elena Kagan well. To most other Americans, she is a mystery
May 13th 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist print edition

SIXTEEN years ago a young scholar complained that the confirmation process for Supreme Court justices had taken on “an air of vacuity and farce”. Senators failed to ask hard questions. Nominees refused to give substantive answers. Ruth Bader Ginsburg dodged every query as either “too specific” (meaning, roughly, anything that might have some bearing on a case that might some day come before the court) or “too general” (roughly, anything else worthy of mention). Let’s bring back the kind of grilling to which Judge Robert Bork was subjected in 1987, wrote Elena Kagan. She must be kicking herself.

Barack Obama nominated Ms Kagan to the Supreme Court on May 10th. Having excoriated Justice Ginsburg for refusing to give straight answers, she will look hypocritical if she does the same. Yet Ms Kagan must have noticed that Judge Bork, who made no secret of his views, was not confirmed, whereas the clam-like Justice Ginsburg was, by 96 votes to three.

The nominee’s career has been marked by frenzied networking and few publicly expressed opinions. She is a pal of nearly every Democrat who counts. She met Mr Obama when he was a humble law lecturer, and is now his solicitor-general. She worked in Bill Clinton’s White House, and also briefly for then-Senator Joe Biden. She clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, a liberal hero. Larry Summers, who was then the boss of Harvard, made her dean of its law school. He is now Mr Obama’s top economic adviser. All these bigwigs think Ms Kagan is hot stuff. Conservative academics find her pleasant, too.

But for those below Olympus, she is a mystery. She has never been a judge, so she has no paper trail of rulings. Given her talents, she has written relatively little, and that little has been cautious and analytical rather than bold and prescriptive. “I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade,” says Tom Goldstein, a legal blogger who nonetheless supports her.

Her weakest spot is that when she led Harvard Law School, she barred military recruiters from campus in protest at the military’s ban on openly gay soldiers. This infuriates middle America. Even people who think the ban on gays in uniform is unjust are affronted that the nation’s top law school should actively discourage its students from serving their country.

Ms Kagan protests that she was only enforcing a long-standing anti-discrimination policy, that the recruiting ban was not absolute and that she loves the military really. But to many, her excuses will sound rather lawyerly. And though she described the gay ban as “a moral injustice of the first order”, she backed down when the university’s federal funding was threatened.

Republicans are already roasting her for this episode. They are also carping about her New Yorkiness—she did not learn to drive a car until her late 20s—and her supposed isolation from the lives of ordinary Americans. John Cornyn, a Republican senator from Texas, grouched that she has “spent her entire professional career in Harvard Square, Hyde Park [the posh Chicago neighbourhood where Mr Obama also lived] and the DC Beltway.”

On more substantial matters, however, Republicans have little to shoot at. Sooner or later, the court will hear a challenge to Mr Obama’s health reform. The constitution empowers Congress to “regulate commerce...among the several states”. Many conservatives think it a stretch to say this means the federal government can force people to buy health insurance, especially when some state governments object. Mr Obama would hardly pick a Supreme Court justice who deemed his greatest domestic accomplishment unconstitutional, but outsiders can only guess how Ms Kagan would interpret the commerce clause more generally. Since many of the powers the federal government has assumed since the 1930s rest on an expansive definition of interstate commerce, this matters.

On social issues, Ms Kagan is clearly liberal, but how liberal? She once wrote that “there is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage,” but it was clear from the context that she was describing the current Supreme Court’s views, not necessarily her own. She once advised Bill Clinton to accept a ban on late-term abortions as part of a compromise. Pro-choicers were outraged when this surfaced. But pro-lifers say the ban had such a broad exception for the mother’s health that it would not have criminalised any abortions at all had it been enacted, which it wasn’t.

Liberals have doubts about her, too. Some accept Mr Obama’s word that she is one of them. Others recall that the last nominee about whom so little was known turned out to be roughly the opposite of what the president who nominated him promised. Granted, George Bush senior did not know David Souter personally, whereas Mr Obama knows Ms Kagan very well. But some liberals are still disgruntled.

Jonathan Turley, a law professor, calls the nomination “a terrible act of betrayal”, because Ms Kagan is insufficiently protective of free speech (she supports restrictions on obscenity) and takes too expansive a view of executive power. During her confirmation as solicitor-general, she agreed with a Republican inquisitor that America is at war with terrorists, and she appeared to agree that an al-Qaeda financier captured in, say, the Philippines, can be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant. This suggests she would be sympathetic to Mr Obama’s claim of almost Bush-like powers over terrorist suspects. Once she has a job for life on the court, she may reveal what she really thinks.

azure9UID: 2789030

【COMMENT】3-2

Innovation in history
Getting better all the time
The biological, cultural and economic forces behind human progress
May 13th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

THIRTY years ago, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered into a famous bet. Mr Simon, a libertarian, was sceptical of the gloomy claims made by Mr Ehrlich, an ecologist best known for his predictions of environmental chaos and human suffering that would result from the supposed “population bomb”. Thumbing his nose at such notions as resource scarcity, Mr Simon wagered that the price of any five commodities chosen by Mr Ehrlich would go down over the following decade. The population bomb was defused, and Mr Simon handily won the bet.

Now, Matt Ridley has a similarly audacious bet in mind. A well-known British science writer (and former Economist journalist), Mr Ridley has taken on the mantle of rational optimism from the late Mr Simon. In his new book, he challenges those nabobs of negativity who argue that the world cannot possibly feed 9 billion mouths, that Africa is destined to fail and that the planet is heading for a climate disaster. He boldly predicts that in 2110, a much bigger world population could enjoy more and better food produced on less land than is used by farming today—and even return lots of farmland to wilderness.

However, mankind cannot hope to achieve this if it turns its back on innovation. Feeding another 2 billion people or more will, of course, mean producing much more food. Genetically modified (GM) agriculture could play an important role, as this technology can greatly increase yields while using smaller inputs of fertiliser, insecticide and water. Many years of field experience in the Americas and Asia have shown GM crops to be safe, but, Mr Ridley rightly complains, the Luddites of the green and organic movements continue to obstruct progress.

The progress (and occasional retardation) of innovation is the central theme of Mr Ridley’s sweeping work. He starts by observing that humans are the only species capable of innovation. Other animals use tools, and some ants, for example, do specialise at certain tasks. But these skills are not cumulative, and the animals in question do not improve their technologies from generation to generation. Only man innovates continuously.

Why should that be? Some have suggested that perhaps it is the chemistry of big brains that leads us to tinker. Others that man’s mastery of language or his capacity for imitation and social learning hold the key. Mr Ridley, a zoologist by training, weighs up these arguments but insists, in the end, that the explanation lies not within man’s brain but outside: innovation is a collective phenomenon. The way man’s collective brain grows, he says cheekily, is by “ideas having sex”.

His own theory is, in a way, the glorious offspring that would result if Charles Darwin’s ideas were mated with those of Adam Smith. Trade, Mr Ridley insists, is the spark that lit the fire of human imagination, as it made possible not only the exchange of goods, but also the exchange of ideas. Trade also encouraged specialisation, since it rewarded individuals and communities who focus on areas of comparative advantage. Such specialists, in contrast with their generalist rivals or ancestors, had the time and the incentive to develop better methods and technologies to do their tasks.

It is this culture of continuous improvement, which was only accelerated by the industrial revolution, that explains the astonishing improvements in the human condition over time. Through most of history, most people lived lives of quiet desperation, humiliating servitude and grinding poverty. And yet, despite the pessimistic proclamations of Mr Ehrlich and many other pundits, economic growth and technological progress have come to the rescue over and over again.

The visible hand
As Mr Simon did in his classic work, “It’s Getting Better all the Time” (2000), Mr Ridley provides ample statistical evidence here to show that life has indeed got better for most people in most places on most measures. Whether one counts air and water pollution in California or vaccination rates in Bangladesh or life expectancy in Japan, his conclusion is indisputable. It does, however, highlight one of the book’s minor flaws: an over-anxious cramming in of too many obscure statistics and calculations that should have been relegated to footnotes or an annex.

Another is the author’s slightly unfair attitude towards government. Mr Ridley makes it abundantly clear that he is a free marketeer, and he provides ample evidence from history that governments are often incompetent and anti-innovation: “The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs is as thin as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.” He is particularly suspicious of strong governments, which he equates with monopolies—and those, he insists, “always grow complacent, stagnant and self-serving.”

He is right that the leaden hand of the state has often suppressed individual freedom and creativity. However, he does not fully acknowledge that some problems do, in fact, require government intervention—especially because markets themselves can sometimes fail spectacularly. Mr Ridley surely knows this, as he was forced to resign as non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, the first British bank to be rescued by the government during the financial crisis. Yet the most he will say about that affair is that he is now mistrustful of markets in capital and assets, but unflinchingly in favour of markets in goods and services.

Mr Ridley is also generally sceptical about global warming, and worries that government policies advocated by greens today will be like treating a nosebleed by putting a tourniquet around one’s neck. He argues that the problem, if it exists, will be solved by bottom-up innovation in energy technologies. But to accomplish that, he wants governments to “enact a heavy carbon tax, and cut payroll taxes.”

That is a sensible prescription (often advocated by this newspaper), but surely a “heavy” tax suggests there is a role for government in fixing market failures? He glosses too over the vital role that air-quality regulations played in cleaning up smog in California, choosing to focus instead on the inventions—like the catalytic converter and low-sulphur fuel—that arose as a result of those technology-forcing measures.

Still, he is on the mark with the big things. “The bottom-up world is to be the great theme of this century,” declares Mr Ridley in the closing pages of this sunny book. He is surely right. Thanks to the liberating forces of globalisation and Googlisation, innovation is no longer the preserve of technocratic elites in ivory towers. It is increasingly an open, networked and democratic endeavour.

If man really can find a way of harnessing the innovative capacity of 9 billion bright sparks, then the audacious prediction about feeding the much hungrier world of 2110 using less land than today may very well be proven right too. After all, man’s greatest asset is his ability to harness that one natural resource that remains infinite in quantity: human ingenuity.

azure9UID: 2789030

Innovation in history
Getting better all the time
The biological, cultural and economic forces behind human progress
May 13th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

THIRTY years ago, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered into a famous bet(enter into a bet). Mr Simon, a libertarian(自由意志主义支持者), was sceptical of the gloomy claims made by Mr Ehrlich, an ecologist(生态学家) best known for his predictions of environmental chaos and human suffering that would result from the supposed “population bomb”. Thumbing his nose(求解) at such notions as resource scarcity(资源短缺), Mr Simon wagered that the price of any five commodities chosen by Mr Ehrlich would go down over the following decade. The population bomb was defused, and Mr Simon handily(巧妙的) won the bet.

sceptical: marked by or given to doubt
handily:in a convenient manner
           with no difficulty         

Now, Matt Ridley has a similarly audacious bet in mind. A well-known British science writer (and former Economist journalist), Mr Ridley has taken on the mantle of rational optimism from the late Mr Simon. In his new book, he challenges those nabobs(太守，富翁，大財主) of negativity who argue that the world cannot possibly feed 9 billion mouths, that Africa is destined to fail and that the planet is heading for a climate disaster(环境问题的表达). He boldly predicts that in 2110, a much bigger world population could enjoy more and better food produced on less land than is used by farming today—and even return lots of farmland to wilderness.

audacious: disposed to venture or take risksd

However, mankind cannot hope to achieve this if it turns its back on innovation.(turn on是to depend on sth,但这里为什么是turns its back on呢?) Feeding another 2 billion people or more will, of course, mean producing much more food. Genetically modified (GM) agriculture could play an important role, as this technology can greatly increase yields while using smaller inputs of fertiliser, insecticide(殺蟲劑) and water. Many years of field experience in the Americas and Asia have shown GM crops to be safe, but, Mr Ridley rightly complains, the Luddites of the green and organic movements continue to obstruct progress.

The progress (and occasional retardation) of innovation is the central theme of Mr Ridley’s sweeping work. He starts by observing that humans are the only species capable of innovation. Other animals use tools, and some ants, for example, do specialise at certain tasks. But these skills are not cumulative, and the animals in question do not improve their technologies from generation to generation. Only man innovates continuously.
这段可以背下来，说明人类的创造性，区别于动物的特征。

retardation: lack of normal development of intellectual capacities
cumulative: increasing by successive addition

Why should that be? Some have suggested that perhaps it is the chemistry of big brains that leads us to tinker. Others that man’s mastery of language or his capacity for imitation and social learning hold the key. Mr Ridley, a zoologist by training, weighs up these arguments but insists, in the end, that the explanation lies not within man’s brain but outside: innovation is a collective phenomenon. The way man’s collective brain grows, he says cheekily, is by “ideas having sex”.
这段也可以背

collective: forming a whole or aggregate

His own theory is, in a way, the glorious offspring that would result if Charles Darwin’s ideas were mated with those of Adam Smith. Trade, Mr Ridley insists, is the spark that lit the fire of human imagination, as it made possible not only the exchange of goods, but also the exchange of ideas.(大好的句子!) Trade also encouraged specialisation, since it rewarded individuals and communities who focus on areas of comparative advantage. Such specialists, in contrast with their generalist(多面手) rivals or ancestors, had the time and the incentive to develop better methods and technologies to do their tasks.

specialisation: the act of specializing; making something suitable for a special purpose

It is this culture of continuous improvement, which was only accelerated by the industrial revolution, that explains the astonishing improvements in the human condition over time. Through most of history, most people lived lives of quiet desperation, humiliating servitude and grinding poverty. And yet, despite the pessimistic proclamations of Mr Ehrlich and many other pundits, economic growth and technological progress have come to the rescue over and over again.

servitude: state of subjection to an owner or master or forced labor imposed as punishment
grinding:  matter resulting from the process of grinding
proclamation: a formal public statement
pundit: someone who has been admitted to membership in a scholarly field

The visible hand
As Mr Simon did in his classic work, “It’s Getting Better all the Time” (2000), Mr Ridley provides ample statistical evidence here to show that life has indeed got better for most people in most places on most measures.(这个是不是可以用在ISSUE130呢？) Whether one counts air and water pollution in California or vaccination(接种疫苗) rates in Bangladesh or life expectancy in Japan, his conclusion is indisputable. It does, however, highlight one of the book’s minor flaws: an over-anxious cramming(塞滿，擠滿) in of too many obscure statistics and calculations that should have been relegated to footnotes or an annex.

indisputable: not open to question; obviously true
                   impossible to doubt or dispute
relegated:of relegate  (relegate: assign to a lower position; reduce in rank)

Another is the author’s slightly unfair attitude towards government. Mr Ridley makes it abundantly clear that he is a free marketeer, and he provides ample evidence from history that governments are often incompetent and anti-innovation: “The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs(法老王) is as thin as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.” He is particularly suspicious of strong governments, which he equates with monopolies—and those, he insists, “always grow complacent, stagnant and self-serving.”

incompetent:  not qualified or suited for a purpose
                    showing lack of skill or aptitude
                    not doing a good job
                    not meeting requirements
stagnant: not growing or changing; without force or vitality

He is right that the leaden hand of the state has often suppressed individual freedom and creativity. However, he does not fully acknowledge that some problems do, in fact, require government intervention—especially because markets themselves can sometimes fail spectacularly. Mr Ridley surely knows this, as he was forced to resign as non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, the first British bank to be rescued by the government during the financial crisis. Yet the most he will say about that affair is that he is now mistrustful of markets in capital and assets, but unflinchingly in favour of markets in goods and services.

intervention: 干涉，介入
unflinchingly: not shrinking from danger

Mr Ridley is also generally sceptical about global warming, and worries that government policies advocated by greens today will be like treating a nosebleed by putting a tourniquet around one’s neck. He argues that the problem, if it exists, will be solved by bottom-up innovation in energy technologies. But to accomplish that, he wants governments to “enact a heavy carbon tax, and cut payroll(薪资账单) taxes.”

enact: order by virtue of superior authority; decree

That is a sensible prescription (often advocated by this newspaper), but surely a “heavy” tax suggests there is a role for government in fixing market failures? He glosses too over the vital role that air-quality regulations played in cleaning up smog in California, choosing to focus instead on the inventions—like the catalytic converter and low-sulphur fuel—that arose as a result of those technology-forcing measures.

catalytic: relating to or causing or involving catalysis; "catalytic reactions

Still, he is on the mark with the big things. “The bottom-up world(求解) is to be the great theme of this century,” declares Mr Ridley in the closing pages of this sunny book. He is surely right. Thanks to the liberating forces of globalisation and Googlisation, innovation is no longer the preserve of technocratic(技术专家政治主义者) elites in ivory towers. It is increasingly an open, networked and democratic endeavour.(好句)

If man really can find a way of harnessing the innovative capacity of 9 billion bright sparks, then the audacious prediction about feeding the much hungrier world of 2110 using less land than today may very well be proven right too. After all, man’s greatest asset is his ability to harness that one natural resource that remains infinite in quantity: human ingenuity.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【COMMENT】3-1 【学习】 The Supreme Court Cracking the Kagan code Barack Obama knows Elena Kagan well. To most other Americans, she is a mystery May 13th 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist print edition SIXTEEN years ago a young scholar complained that the confirmation process for Supreme Court justices had taken on “an air of vacuity and farce（真空的空气和闹剧？）”. Senators failed to ask hard questions. Nominees（提名人，什么是提名人？） refused to give substantive answers. Ruth Bader Ginsburg dodged（躲闪） every query as either “too specific” (meaning, roughly（大致）, anything that might have some bearing on a case that might some day come before the court) or “too general” (roughly, anything else worthy of mention). Let’s bring back the kind of grilling to which Judge Robert Bork was subjected in 1987, wrote Elena Kagan. She must be kicking（踢） herself. Barack Obama nominated(提名) Ms Kagan to the Supreme Court on May 10th. Having excoriated（苛责） Justice Ginsburg for refusing to give straight answers, she will look hypocritical（虚伪） if she does the same. Yet Ms Kagan must have noticed that Judge Bork, who made no secret of his views（坦诚）, was not confirmed, whereas the clam-like（？？） Justice Ginsburg was, by 96 votes to three. The nominee’s career has been marked by frenzied（疯狂的） networking and few publicly expressed opinions. She is a pal（朋友） of nearly every Democrat who counts. She met Mr Obama when he was a humble law lecturer, and is now his solicitor-general（副检察长）. She worked in Bill Clinton’s White House, and also briefly for then-Senator（当时的参议员） Joe Biden. She clerked for（为……工作） Justice Thurgood Marshall, a liberal hero. Larry Summers, who was then the boss of Harvard, made her dean of its law school. He is now Mr Obama’s top economic adviser. All these bigwigs（头面人物） think Ms Kagan (sb) is hot stuff. Conservative academics find her pleasant, too. 此段有不少夸人好的词啊！ But for those below Olympus, she is a mystery. She has never been a judge, so she has no paper trail of rulings. Given her talents, she has written relatively little, and that little has been cautious and analytical rather than bold and prescriptive（惯例的）. “I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade,” says Tom Goldstein, a legal blogger who nonetheless supports her. Her weakest spot is that when she led Harvard Law School, she barred military recruiters from campus in protest at the military’s ban on openly gay soldiers. This infuriates（激怒sb） middle America. Even people who think the ban on gays in uniform is unjust are affronted（侮辱） that the nation’s top law school should actively discourage its students from serving their country. Ms Kagan protests that she was only enforcing a long-standing anti-discrimination policy, that the recruiting ban was not absolute and that she loves the military really. But to many, her excuses will sound rather lawyerly. And though she described the gay ban as “a moral injustice of the first order”, she backed down when the university’s federal funding was threatened. Republicans are already roasting her for this episode. They are also carping about her New Yorkiness—she did not learn to drive a car until her late 20s—and her supposed isolation from the lives of ordinary Americans. John Cornyn, a Republican senator from Texas, grouched（发牢骚） that she has “spent her entire professional career in Harvard Square, Hyde Park [the posh Chicago neighbourhood where Mr Obama also lived] and the DC Beltway.” On more substantial matters, however, Republicans have little to shoot at. Sooner or later, the court will hear a challenge to Mr Obama’s health reform. The constitution empowers Congress to “regulate commerce...among the several states”. Many conservatives think it a stretch to say this means the federal government can force people to buy health insurance, especially when some state governments object. Mr Obama would hardly pick a Supreme Court justice who deemed his greatest domestic accomplishment unconstitutional, but outsiders can only guess how Ms Kagan would interpret the commerce clause more generally. Since many of the powers the federal government has assumed since the 1930s rest on an expansive definition of interstate commerce, this matters. 这段我看得有点稀里糊涂的 On social issues, Ms Kagan is clearly liberal, but how liberal? She once wrote that “there is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage,” but it was clear from the context that she was describing the current Supreme Court’s views, not necessarily her own. She once advised Bill Clinton to accept a ban on late-term abortions as part of a compromise. Pro-choicers were outraged when this surfaced. But pro-lifers say the ban had such a broad exception for the mother’s health that it would not have criminalised any abortions at all had it been enacted, which it wasn’t. Liberals have doubts about her, too. Some accept Mr Obama’s word that she is one of them. Others recall that the last nominee about whom so little was known turned out to be roughly the opposite of what the president who nominated him promised. Granted, George Bush senior did not know David Souter personally, whereas Mr Obama knows Ms Kagan very well. But some liberals are still disgruntled. Jonathan Turley, a law professor, calls the nomination “a terrible act of betrayal”, because Ms Kagan is insufficiently protective of free speech (she supports restrictions on obscenity) and takes too expansive a view of executive power. During her confirmation as solicitor-general, she agreed with a Republican inquisitor that America is at war with terrorists, and she appeared to agree that an al-Qaeda financier captured in, say, the Philippines, can be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant. This suggests she would be sympathetic to Mr Obama’s claim of almost Bush-like powers over terrorist suspects. Once she has a job for life on the court, she may reveal what she really thinks.

女人比较善变的么？嘿嘿。。。

annie-dollUID: 2706282

Innovation in history
Getting better all the timeThe biological, cultural and economic forces behind human progressMay 13th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
THIRTY years ago, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered into a famous bet. Mr Simon, a libertarian, was skeptical of the gloomy claims made by Mr Ehrlich, an ecologist best known for his predictions of environmental chaos and human suffering that would result from the supposed “population bomb”. Thumbing his nose at such notions as resource scarcity, Mr Simon wagered that the price of any five commodities chosen by Mr Ehrlich would go down over the following decade. The population bomb was defused, and Mr Simon handily won the bet.
Defuse 减少…的危险性
The two groups will meet next week to try to defuse the crisis.
这两个小组下周将会面,试图缓和危机。
Now, Matt Ridley has a similarly audacious bet in mind. A well-known British science writer (and former Economist journalist), Mr Ridley has taken on the mantle of 继承衣钵rational optimism from the late Mr Simon. In his new book, he challenges those nabobs of negativity who argue that the world cannot possibly feed 9 billion mouths, that Africa is destined to fail and that the planet is heading for a climate disaster. He boldly predicts that in 2110, a much bigger world population could enjoy more and better food produced on less land than is used by farming today—and even return lots of farmland to wilderness.
However, mankind cannot hope to achieve this if it turns its back on innovation. Feeding another 2 billion people or more will, of course, mean producing much more food. Genetically modified (GM) agriculture could play an important role, as this technology can greatly increase yields while using smaller inputs of fertiliser, insecticide and water. Many years of field experience in the Americas and Asia have shown GM crops to be safe, but, Mr Ridley rightly complains, the Luddites强烈反对机械化的人 of the green and organic movements continue to obstruct progress.
The progress (and occasional retardation) of innovation is the central theme of Mr Ridley’s sweeping work. He starts by observing that humans are the only species capable of innovation. Other animals use tools, and some ants, for example, do specialise at certain tasks. But these skills are not cumulative, and the animals in question do not improve their technologies from generation to generation. Only man innovates continuously.
Why should that be? Some have suggested that perhaps it is the chemistry of big brains that leads us to tinker. Others that man’s mastery of language or his capacity for imitation and social learning hold the key. Mr Ridley, a zoologist by training, weighs up these arguments but insists, in the end, that the explanation lies not within man’s brain but outside: innovation is a collective phenomenon. The way man’s collective brain grows, he says cheekily, is by “ideas having sex”.
His own theory is, in a way, the glorious offspring that would result if Charles Darwin’s ideas were mated with those of Adam Smith. Trade, Mr Ridley insists, is the spark that lit the fire of human imagination, as it made possible not only the exchange of goods, but also the exchange of ideas. Trade also encouraged specialisation, since it rewarded individuals and communities who focus on areas of comparative advantage. Such specialists, in contrast with their generalist rivals or ancestors, had the time and the incentive to develop better methods and technologies to do their tasks.
It is this culture of continuous improvement, which was only accelerated by the industrial revolution, that explains the astonishing improvements in the human condition over time. Through most of history, most people lived lives of quiet desperation, humiliating servitude and grinding poverty. And yet, despite the pessimistic proclamations of Mr Ehrlich and many other pundits, economic growth and technological progress have come to the rescue over and over again.
The visible handAs Mr Simon did in his classic work, “It’s Getting Better all the Time” (2000), Mr Ridley provides ample statistical evidence here to show that life has indeed got better for most people in most places on most measures. Whether one counts air and water pollution in California or vaccination rates in Bangladesh or life expectancy in Japan, his conclusion is indisputable. It does, however, highlight one of the book’s minor flaws: an over-anxious cramming in of too many obscure statistics and calculations that should have been relegated降级，转移 to footnotes or an annex.
Another is the author’s slightly unfair attitude towards government. Mr Ridley makes it abundantly clear that he is a free marketeer, and he provides ample evidence from history that governments are often incompetent and anti-innovation: “The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs法老 is as thin as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.” He is particularly suspicious of strong governments, which he equates with monopolies—and those, he insists, “always grow complacent, stagnant and self-serving.”
He is right that the leaden hand of the state has often suppressed individual freedom and creativity. However, he does not fully acknowledge that some problems do, in fact, require government intervention—especially because markets themselves can sometimes fail spectacularly. Mr Ridley surely knows this, as he was forced to resign as non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, the first British bank to be rescued by the government during the financial crisis. Yet the most he will say about that affair is that he is now mistrustful of markets in capital and assets, but unflinchingly in favour of markets in goods and services.
Mr Ridley is also generally sceptical about global warming, and worries that government policies advocated by greens today will be like treating a nosebleed by putting a tourniquet止血带 around one’s neck. He argues that the problem, if it exists, will be solved by bottom-up innovation in energy technologies. But to accomplish that, he wants governments to “enact a heavy carbon tax, and cut payroll taxes.”
That is a sensible prescription (often advocated by this newspaper), but surely a “heavy” tax suggests there is a role for government in fixing market failures? He glosses too over the vital role that air-quality regulations played in cleaning up smog in California, choosing to focus instead on the inventions—like the catalytic converter and low-sulphur fuel—that arose as a result of those technology-forcing measures.
Still, he is on the mark with the big things. “The bottom-up world is to be the great theme of this century,” declares Mr Ridley in the closing pages of this sunny book. He is surely right. Thanks to the liberating forces of globalisation and Googlisation, innovation is no longer the preserve of technocratic elites in ivory towers. It is increasingly an open, networked and democratic endeavour.
If man really can find a way of harnessing the innovative capacity of 9 billion bright sparks, then the audacious prediction about feeding the much hungrier world of 2110 using less land than today may very well be proven right too. After all, man’s greatest asset is his ability to harness that one natural resource that remains infinite in quantity: human ingenuity.

azure9UID: 2789030

Women on company boards
La vie en rose
French companies get serious about putting women in the boardroom
May 6th 2010 | PARIS | From The Economist print edition

MOST French bosses have little time for a new law, now going through parliament, which would compel listed companies to lift the proportion of women on their boards to 40% by 2016. Xavier Fontanet, chief executive of Essilor, an eyewear firm, has quoted Charles de Gaulle as saying, “One may not command without having obeyed.” His point is that few women have had the 30 years or so of experience climbing the corporate ladder that a good director requires.

Nonetheless, the government is determined to make France the second country with a compulsory quota for women in the boardroom. (Norway was the first.) At the start of the year women occupied just 11% of the total of around 580 board seats at France’s biggest 40 firms. Now bosses will have to find as many as 170 new female directors in six years, according to OFG Research. “We are looking for women to fill every seat vacated by a man,” says Diane Segalen, vice-chairman of CTPartners, a headhunting firm in Paris.

In private, chief executives say they will look for female board members of a particular type: those who will look decorative and not rock the boat. One boss asked a headhunter for photographs of candidates and said he would treat looks as his first criterion, ahead of industry experience. A board member of a multinational company who opposes the 40% quota said that bosses could simply appoint their wives or—more subtly—their girlfriends.

Some recent appointments have certainly raised eyebrows. In March Dassault Aviation, a manufacturer of fighter planes and corporate jets, said it would nominate Nicole Dassault, the 79-year-old wife of Serge Dassault, its controlling shareholder, to its board. Mrs Dassault has little hands-on business experience. LVMH has nominated Bernadette Chirac, the 76-year-old wife of the former French president. Mrs Chirac’s qualifications, explained the company, were that she was female and that as first lady she supported fashion and regularly attended catwalk shows.

Companies with no family controlling shareholder, to be sure, will be expected to propose more qualified candidates. But finding them is not always easy. Sanofi-Aventis, a pharmaceuticals firm, was disappointed when Catherine Bréchignac, the head of the national science research agency, withdrew her candidacy. Some firms are tackling the shortage of senior women with direct experience of their industry by looking far outside. Vivendi, a telecoms and media group, for instance, found Aliza Jabès, the glamorous founder of NUXE, a beauty-products firm, having used her in an ad campaign for its corporate mobile-phone products.

So far, says Pierre-Yves Gomez of EMLYON Business School, appointments such as Mrs Chirac’s confirm that the first reaction of French chief executives is to find women who will not challenge them. Because companies must find a lot of them in a short time, some women will gather many board seats. One female director, indeed, has had seven offers since January. A perverse effect of the quota, therefore, says Mr Gomez, may be to reduce rather than increase board diversity.

azure9UID: 2789030

Student’s Arrest Tests Immigration Policy
By ROBBIE BROWN
Published: May 14, 2010 From the New York Time

ATLANTA — Jessica Colotl, a 21-year-old college student and illegal Mexican immigrant at the center of a contentious immigration case, surrendered to a Georgia sheriff on Friday but continued to deny wrongdoing.

Ms. Colotl was arrested in March for driving without a license and could face deportation next year. On Wednesday the sheriff filed a felony charge against her for providing a false address to the police.

The case has become a flash point in the national debate over whether federal immigration laws should be enforced by local and state officials. And like Arizona’s tough new immigration law, it has highlighted a rift between the federal government and local politicians over how illegal immigrants should be detected and prosecuted.

“I never thought that I’d be caught up in this messed-up system,” Ms. Colotl said Friday at a news conference after being released on $2,500 bail. “I was treated like a criminal, like a threat to the nation.”

Civil rights groups say Ms. Colotl should be spared deportation because she was brought to the United States without legal documents by her parents at age 11. They also note that she has excelled academically and was discovered to be here illegally only after a routine traffic violation.

Supporters of immigration laws and the sheriff’s office in Cobb County say she violated state law, misled the police about her address and should not receive special treatment for her age or education.

Ms. Colotl was pulled over March 29 by a campus officer at Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta, where she is two semesters from graduation, for “impeding the flow of traffic.” After she presented the officer an expired Mexican passport instead of a valid driver’s license, she was arrested and taken to a county jail, where she acknowledged being an illegal immigrant.

On May 5, she was transferred to the Etowah Detention Center in Alabama to await deportation to Mexico.

But after protests by Latino groups, demonstrations at the Georgia Capitol by her sorority sisters and a letter of support from the university’s president, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency granted a one-year deferral on her deportation so she could finish college. The “deferred action” means she could still be deported, but will be allowed to apply for an extension next year.

Her ultimate goal, Ms. Colotl said at the news conference, is that proposed legislation called the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act — known as the Dream Act — will become law, providing students without legal immigration status a path to become legal.

She and her lawyer declined to discuss the immigration status of her parents.

In Georgia, the case has become intensely political. Ms. Colotl received in-state tuition, substantially reducing her cost of attending Kennesaw State. The university will charge her out-of-state rates in the future, but Republican politicians are calling for new legislation to make attendance more expensive, or impossible, for illegal immigrants.

One Republican candidate for governor, Eric Johnson, has said that if elected he will mandate that all college applicants demonstrate their citizenship. The chancellor of the state university system says that would be prohibitively expensive, costing $1.5 million, for roughly 300,000 students.

Under a program by the Department of Homeland Security, known as 287(g), local sheriffs are permitted to handle federal immigration law enforcement. The Cobb County sheriff’s office was the first in Georgia and one of the first in the United States to apply for the program. Immigration is a hot topic in the largely conservative county, where Hispanics make up 11 percent of the population, census figures show.

Mary Bauer, the legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is assisting in Ms. Colotl’s defense, said Cobb County had a history of using federal laws designed to detect dangerous criminals for arresting illegal immigrants for minor offenses. A review by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that from 2007 to 2009, the main crime for which immigration detainees were arrested in the county was traffic offenses.

“This is a civil rights disaster,” said Ms. Bauer, who called the county’s application of the law “mean-spirited and very probably illegal.”

“We call on the Obama administration to end 287(g),” she said.

Supporters of strict immigration legislation say Ms. Colotl’s case was handled legally.

The sheriff, Neil Warren, said Ms. Colotl provided a false address to the police, a felony charge. Her lawyers say that she provided the address of the residence where she used to live and to where her car insurance is registered, and that she also provided her current address.

No exception should be made, however admirable the offender, said Phil Kent, a spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control, a national group opposed to illegal immigration.

“Ironically, she says she wants to go on to law school, but she’s undermining the law,” Mr. Kent said. “What’s the point of educating an illegal immigrant in a system where she can’t hold a job legally or get a driver’s license?”

azure9UID: 2789030

Women on company boards
La vie en rose
French companies get serious about putting women in the boardroom
May 6th 2010 | PARIS | From The Economist print edition

MOST French bosses have little time for a new law, now going through parliament, which would compel listed companies to lift the proportion of women on their boards to 40% by 2016. Xavier Fontanet, chief executive of Essilor, an eyewear firm, has quoted Charles de Gaulle as saying, “One may not command without having obeyed.” His point is that few women have had the 30 years or so of experience climbing the corporate ladder that a good director requires.

Nonetheless, the government is determined to make France the second country with a compulsory quota(强制性的配額) for women in the boardroom. (Norway was the first.) At the start of the year women occupied just 11% of the total of around 580 board seats at France’s biggest 40 firms. Now bosses will have to find as many as 170 new female directors in six years, according to OFG Research. “We are looking for women to fill every seat vacated by a man,” says Diane Segalen, vice-chairman of CTPartners, a headhunting firm in Paris.

compulsory: required by rule
vacated: leave voluntarily; of a job, post or position
             leave behind empty; move out of
            
In private, chief executives say they will look for female board members of a particular type: those who will look decorative and not rock the boat. One boss asked a headhunter for photographs of candidates and said he would treat looks as his first criterion, ahead of industry experience. A board member of a multinational company(跨國公司) who opposes the 40% quota said that bosses could simply appoint their wives or—more subtly—their girlfriends.

decorative: serving an esthetic rather than a useful purpose
criterion: a basis for comparison; a reference point against which other things can be evaluated
              the ideal in terms of which something can be judged

Some recent appointments have certainly raised eyebrows. In March Dassault Aviation(飛行，航空，飛行術), a manufacturer of fighter planes and corporate jets, said it would nominate Nicole Dassault, the 79-year-old wife of Serge Dassault, its controlling shareholder(股東), to its board. Mrs Dassault has little hands-on business experience. LVMH has nominated Bernadette Chirac, the 76-year-old wife of the former French president. Mrs Chirac’s qualifications, explained the company, were that she was female and that as first lady she supported fashion and regularly attended catwalk shows.

nominate:  propose as a candidate for some honor

Companies with no family controlling shareholder, to be sure, will be expected to propose more qualified candidates. But finding them is not always easy. Sanofi-Aventis, a pharmaceuticals(藥物) firm, was disappointed when Catherine Bréchignac, the head of the national science research agency, withdrew her candidacy. Some firms are tackling the shortage of senior women with direct experience of their industry by looking far outside. Vivendi, a telecoms and media group, for instance, found Aliza Jabès, the glamorous founder of NUXE, a beauty-products firm, having used her in an ad campaign for its corporate mobile-phone products.

tackle: accept as a challenge
          set about dealing with

So far, says Pierre-Yves Gomez of EMLYON Business School, appointments such as Mrs Chirac’s confirm that the first reaction of French chief executives is to find women who will not challenge them. Because companies must find a lot of them in a short time, some women will gather many board seats. One female director, indeed, has had seven offers since January. A perverse effect of the quota, therefore, says Mr Gomez, may be to reduce rather than increase board diversity.

talentliuyangUID: 2752741

学习4-1

Women on company boards
La vie en rose
French companies get serious about putting women in the boardroom
May 6th 2010 | PARIS | From The Economist print edition

MOST French bosses have little time for a new law, now going through parliament, which would compel listed companies to lift the proportion of women on their boards to 40% by 2016. Xavier Fontanet, chief executive of Essilor, an eyewear firm, has quoted Charles de Gaulle as saying, “One may not command without having obeyed.” His point is that few women have had the 30 years or so of experience climbing the corporate ladder that a good director requires.
很形象的比喻

Nonetheless, the government is determined to make France the second country with a compulsory quota for women in the boardroom. (Norway was the first.) At the start of the year women occupied just 11% of the total of around 580 board seats at France’s biggest 40 firms. Now bosses will have to find as many as 170 new female directors in six years, according to OFG Research. “We are looking for women to fill every seat vacated by a man,” says Diane Segalen, vice-chairman of CTPartners, a headhunting firm in Paris.

In private, chief executives say they will look for female board members of a particular type: those who will look decorative and not rock the boat. One boss asked a headhunter for photographs of candidates and said he would treat looks as his first criterion, ahead of industry experience. A board member of a multinational company who opposes the 40% quota said that bosses could simply appoint their wives or—more subtly—their girlfriends.

Some recent appointments have certainly raised eyebrows. In March Dassault Aviation, a manufacturer of fighter planes and corporate jets, said it would nominate Nicole Dassault, the 79-year-old wife of Serge Dassault, its controlling shareholder, to its board. Mrs Dassault has little hands-on business experience. LVMH has nominated Bernadette Chirac, the 76-year-old wife of the former French president. Mrs Chirac’s qualifications, explained the company, were that she was female and that as first lady she supported fashion and regularly attended catwalk shows.

Companies with no family controlling shareholder, to be sure, will be expected to propose more qualified candidates. But finding them is not always easy. Sanofi-Aventis, a pharmaceuticals firm, was disappointed when Catherine Bréchignac, the head of the national science research agency, withdrew her candidacy. Some firms are tackling the shortage of senior women with direct experience of their industry by looking far outside. Vivendi, a telecoms and media group, for instance, found Aliza Jabès, the glamorous founder of NUXE, a beauty-products firm, having used her in an ad campaign for its corporate mobile-phone products.

So far, says Pierre-Yves Gomez of EMLYON Business School, appointments such as Mrs Chirac’s confirm that the first reaction of French chief executives is to find women who will not challenge them. Because companies must find a lot of them in a short time, some women will gather many board seats. One female director, indeed, has had seven offers since January. A perverse effect of the quota, therefore, says Mr Gomez, may be to reduce rather than increase board diversity.

azure9UID: 2789030

Student’s Arrest Tests Immigration Policy
By ROBBIE BROWN
Published: May 14, 2010 From the New York Time

ATLANTA — Jessica Colotl, a 21-year-old college student and illegal Mexican immigrant at the center of a contentious immigration case, surrendered to a Georgia sheriff on Friday but continued to deny wrongdoing.

contentious: having or showing a ready disposition to fight
                   inclined or showing an inclination to dispute or disagree, even to engage in law suits
                   involving or likely to cause controversy

Ms. Colotl was arrested in March for driving without a license and could face deportation next year. On Wednesday the sheriff filed a felony charge against her for providing a false address to the police.

deportation: the act of expelling a person from their native land

The case has become a flash point in the national debate over whether federal immigration laws should be enforced by local and state officials. And like Arizona’s tough new immigration law, it has highlighted a rift between the federal government and local politicians over how illegal immigrants should be detected and prosecuted.

federal: national; especially in reference to the government of the United States as distinct from that of its member units
enforce: ensure observance of laws and rules
             compel or impose
prosecute: conduct a prosecution in a court of law
                bring a criminal action against (in a trial)
                carry out or participate in an activity; be involved in

“I never thought that I’d be caught up in this messed-up system,” Ms. Colotl said Friday at a news conference after being released on $2,500 bail. “I was treated like a criminal, like a threat to the nation.”
Civil rights groups say Ms. Colotl should be spared deportation because she was brought to the United States without legal documents by her parents at age 11. They also note that she has excelled academically and was discovered to be here illegally only after a routine traffic violation.
Supporters of immigration laws and the sheriff’s office in Cobb County say she violated state law, misled the police about her address and should not receive special treatment for her age or education.

Ms. Colotl was pulled over March 29 by a campus officer at Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta, where she is two semesters from graduation, for “impeding the flow of traffic.” After she presented the officer an expired Mexican passport instead of a valid driver’s license, she was arrested and taken to a county jail, where she acknowledged being an illegal immigrant.

pull over: to make a driver or vehicle move to the side of the road
impeding: preventing movement
expired: having come to an end or become void after passage of a period of time

On May 5, she was transferred to the Etowah Detention Center in Alabama to await deportation to Mexico.
But after protests by Latino groups, demonstrations at the Georgia Capitol by her sorority(女學生聯誼會) sisters and a letter of support from the university’s president, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency granted a one-year deferral on her deportation so she could finish college. The “deferred action” means she could still be deported, but will be allowed to apply for an extension next year.

deferral:

Her ultimate goal, Ms. Colotl said at the news conference, is that proposed legislation called the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act — known as the Dream Act — will become law, providing students without legal immigration status a path to become legal.

legislation:  law enacted by a legislative body
                 the act of legislating

She and her lawyer declined to discuss the immigration status of her parents.
In Georgia, the case has become intensely political. Ms. Colotl received in-state tuition, substantially reducing her cost of attending Kennesaw State. The university will charge her out-of-state rates in the future, but Republican politicians are calling for new legislation to make attendance more expensive, or impossible, for illegal immigrants.
One Republican candidate for governor, Eric Johnson, has said that if elected he will mandate that all college applicants demonstrate their citizenship. The chancellor of the state university system says that would be prohibitively expensive, costing $1.5 million, for roughly 300,000 students.

prohibitive:tending to discourage (especially of prices)

Under a program by the Department of Homeland Security, known as 287(g), local sheriffs are permitted to handle federal immigration law enforcement. The Cobb County sheriff’s office was the first in Georgia and one of the first in the United States to apply for the program. Immigration is a hot topic in the largely conservative county, where Hispanics make up 11 percent of the population, census(人口普查) figures show.
Mary Bauer, the legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is assisting in Ms. Colotl’s defense, said Cobb County had a history of using federal laws designed to detect dangerous criminals for arresting illegal immigrants for minor offenses. A review by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that from 2007 to 2009, the main crime for which immigration detainees(被拘留者，未被判決的囚犯) were arrested in the county was traffic offenses.
“This is a civil rights disaster,” said Ms. Bauer, who called the county’s application of the law “mean-spirited and very probably illegal.”
"We call on the Obama administration to end 287(g),” she said.
Supporters of strict immigration legislation say Ms. Colotl’s case was handled legally.

The sheriff, Neil Warren, said Ms. Colotl provided a false address to the police, a felony charge. Her lawyers say that she provided the address of the residence where she used to live and to where her car insurance is registered, and that she also provided her current address.
No exception should be made, however admirable the offender, said Phil Kent, a spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control, a national group opposed to illegal immigration.
“Ironically, she says she wants to go on to law school, but she’s undermining the law,” Mr. Kent said. “What’s the point of educating an illegal immigrant in a system where she can’t hold a job legally or get a driver’s license?”

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【COMMENT】4-1 【学习】

Women on company boards La vie en rose French companies get serious about putting women in the boardroom May 6th 2010 | PARIS | From The Economist print edition MOST French bosses have little time for a new law, now going through parliament（议会）, which would compel listed companies to lift the proportion of women on their boards to 40% by 2016. Xavier Fontanet, chief executive of Essilor, an eyewear（眼镜） firm, has quoted Charles de Gaulle as saying, “One may not command without having obeyed（？推测是对女性进aboard的反对意见吧？）.” His point is that few women have had the 30 years or so of experience climbing the corporate ladder that a good director requires. Nonetheless, the government is determined to make France the second country with a compulsory quota（强制配额） for women in the boardroom. (Norway was the first.) At the start of the year women occupied just 11% of the total of around 580 board seats at France’s biggest 40 firms. Now bosses will have to find as many as 170 new female directors in six years, according to OFG Research. “We are looking for women to fill every seat vacated by a man,” says Diane Segalen, vice-chairman of CTPartners, a headhunting（？？猎头公司？） firm in Paris. In private, chief executives say they will look for female board members of a particular type: those who will look decorative and not rock the boat. One boss asked a headhunter for photographs of candidates and said he would treat looks as his first criterion, ahead of industry experience. A board member of a multinational company who opposes the 40% quota said that bosses could simply appoint their wives or—more subtly—their girlfriends. 我的感想：我滴个汗呐，怎么会这样，是女性的无能的么？ Some recent appointments have certainly raised eyebrows（不满）. In March Dassault Aviation（飞行）, a manufacturer of fighter planes and corporate jets, said it would nominate Nicole Dassault, the 79-year-old wife of Serge Dassault, its controlling shareholder, to its board. Mrs Dassault has little hands-on business experience. LVMH has nominated Bernadette Chirac, the 76-year-old wife of the former French president. Mrs Chirac’s qualifications, explained the company, were that she was female and that as first lady she supported fashion and regularly attended catwalk shows. Companies with no family controlling shareholder, to be sure, will be expected to propose more qualified candidates. But finding them is not always easy. Sanofi-Aventis, a pharmaceuticals firm（药物）, was disappointed when Catherine Bréchignac, the head of the national science research agency, withdrew her candidacy. Some firms are tackling the shortage of senior women with direct experience of their industry by looking far outside. Vivendi, a telecoms and media group, for instance, found Aliza Jabès, the glamorous founder of NUXE, a beauty-products firm, having used her in an ad campaign for its corporate mobile-phone products. So far, says Pierre-Yves Gomez of EMLYON Business School, appointments such as Mrs Chirac’s confirm that the first reaction of French chief executives is to find women who will not challenge them. Because companies must find a lot of them in a short time, some women will gather（占有） many board seats. One female director, indeed, has had seven offers since January. A perverse effect（不合情理的） of the quota, therefore, says Mr Gomez, may be to reduce rather than increase board diversity. 我想知道为啥不给点时间慢慢找femal board。

azure9UID: 2789030

不是女性的無能，是男性害怕女性rock the boat

lty900301UID: 2715509

【COMMENT】3-2 学习

Innovation in history Getting better all the time The biological, cultural and economic forces behind human progress May 13th 2010 | From The Economist print edition THIRTY years ago, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich　entered into a famous bet. Mr Simon, a libertarian(自由意志主义者), was sceptical（怀疑的） of the gloomy claims made by Mr Ehrlich, an ecologist best known for his predictions of environmental chaos and human suffering that would result from the supposed “population bomb”. Thumbing his nose((向…) 作蔑视(或侮辱)的手势) at such notions（见解） as resource scarcity(资源短缺), Mr Simon wagered（打赌） that the price of any five commodities chosen by Mr Ehrlich would go down over the following decade. The population bomb was defused, and Mr Simon handily(巧妙的in a convenient manner／with no difficulty) won the bet. Now, Matt Ridley has a similarly audacious bet in mind. A well-known British science writer (and former Economist journalist), Mr Ridley has taken on the mantle of rational optimism（不太理解什么意思） from the late Mr Simon. In his new book, he challenges those nabobs(富翁，地方长官) of negativity who argue that the world cannot possibly feed 9 billion mouths, that Africa is destined to fail and that the planet is heading for a climate disaster(环境问题的表达). He boldly predicts that in 2110, a much bigger world population could enjoy more and better food produced on less land than is used by farming today—and even return lots of farmland to wilderness. However, mankind cannot hope to achieve this if it turns its back on innovation. Feeding another 2 billion people or more will, of course, mean producing much more food. Genetically modified (GM) agriculture could play an important role, as this technology can greatly increase yields while using smaller inputs of fertiliser, insecticide and water. Many years of field experience in the Americas and Asia have shown GM crops to be safe, but, Mr Ridley rightly complains, the Luddites(卢德派，卢德分子) of the green and organic movements continue to obstruct progress. The progress (and occasional retardation 阻碍) of innovation is the central theme of Mr Ridley’s sweeping work. He starts by observing that humans are the only species capable of innovation. Other animals use tools, and some ants, for example, do specialise at certain tasks. But these skills are not cumulative, and the animals in question do not improve their technologies from generation to generation. Only man innovates continuously. //这段说明人类的创造性。可以用作关于创造性的文章 Why should that be? Some have suggested that perhaps it is the chemistry of big brains that leads us to tinker. Others that man’s mastery of language or his capacity for imitation and social learning hold the key. Mr Ridley, a zoologist by training, weighs up these arguments but insists, in the end, that the explanation lies not within man’s brain but outside: innovation is a collective phenomenon. The way man’s collective brain grows, he says cheekily, is by “ideas having sex”. His own theory is, in a way, the glorious offspring（子孙，后代） that would result if Charles Darwin’s ideas were mated with those of Adam Smith. Trade, Mr Ridley insists, is the spark that lit the fire of human imagination, as it made possible not only the exchange of goods, but also the exchange of ideas.(好句子) Trade also encouraged specialisation, since it rewarded individuals and communities who focus on areas of comparative advantage. Such specialists, in contrast with their generalist rivals（竞争者） or ancestors, had the time and the incentive to develop better methods and technologies to do their tasks. It is this culture of continuous improvement, which was only accelerated by the industrial revolution, that explains the astonishing improvements in the human condition over time. Through most of history, most people lived lives of quiet desperation, humiliating servitude （奴隶） and grinding（折磨） poverty. And yet, despite the pessimistic（悲观的） proclamations（公布，宣告） of Mr Ehrlich and many other pundits（博学者，梵文学者）, economic growth and technological progress have come to the rescue over and over again. The visible hand As Mr Simon did in his classic work, “It’s Getting Better all the Time” (2000), Mr Ridley provides ample statistical evidence here to show that life has indeed got better for most people in most places on most measures. Whether one counts air and water pollution in California or vaccination(接种疫苗) rates in Bangladesh or life expectancy in Japan, his conclusion is indisputable（明白的，无争论余地的）. It does, however, highlight one of the book’s minor flaws: an over-anxious cramming(塞满，挤满) in of too many obscure statistics and calculations that should have been relegated（把。。。降低到，归入，提交） to footnotes or an annex. Another is the author’s slightly unfair attitude towards government. Mr Ridley makes it abundantly clear that he is a free marketeer（市场商人）, and he provides ample evidence from history that governments are often incompetent（无能力的，不胜任的；不合适的） and anti-innovation: “The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs(法老王) is as thin as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.” He is particularly suspicious of strong governments, which he equates with monopolies—and those, he insists, “always grow complacent, stagnant(停滞的，污蚀的) and self-serving.” He is right that the leaden（铅一般重的） hand of the state has often suppressed individual freedom and creativity. However, he does not fully acknowledge that some problems do, in fact, require government intervention（干涉，介入）—especially because markets themselves can sometimes fail spectacularly. Mr Ridley surely knows this, as he was forced to resign as non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, the first British bank to be rescued by the government during the financial crisis. Yet the most he will say about that affair is that he is now mistrustful of markets in capital and assets, but unflinchingly（不妥协地，不萎缩的） in favour of markets in goods and services. Mr Ridley is also generally sceptical about global warming, and worries that government policies advocated by greens today will be like treating a nosebleed by putting a tourniquet around one’s neck. He argues that the problem, if it exists, will be solved by bottom-up innovation in energy technologies. But to accomplish that, he wants governments to “enact（颁布） a heavy carbon tax, and cut payroll(薪资账单) taxes.” That is a sensible prescription (often advocated by this newspaper), but surely a “heavy” tax suggests there is a role for government in fixing market failures? He glosses too over the vital role that air-quality regulations played in cleaning up smog in California, choosing to focus instead on the inventions—like the catalytic（催化剂relating to or causing or involving catalysis） converter and low-sulphur（低的，浅的；粗俗的；卑贱的；消沉的） fuel—that arose as a result of those technology-forcing measures. Still, he is on the mark with the big things. “The bottom-up（自底而上的，从细节到总体的） world is to be the great theme of this century,” declares Mr Ridley in the closing pages of this sunny book. He is surely right. Thanks to the liberating forces of globalisation and Googlisation, innovation is no longer the preserve of technocratic(技术专家政治主义者) elites in ivory towers. It is increasingly an open, networked and democratic endeavour. If man really can find a way of harnessing the innovative capacity of 9 billion bright sparks, then the audacious prediction about feeding the much hungrier world of 2110 using less land than today may very well be proven right too. After all, man’s greatest asset is his ability to harness that one natural resource that remains infinite in quantity: human ingenuity.