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flearUID: 2533174

经济类 社会类 obama在各方面的主张obamaIn economic affairs, in April 2005, he defended the New Deal social welfare policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and opposed Republican proposals to establish private accounts for Social Security.[146] In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Obama spoke out against government indifference to growing economic class divisions, calling on both political parties to take action to restore the social safety net for the poor.[147] Shortly before announcing his presidential campaign, Obama said he supports universal health care in the United States.[148] He has proposed rewarding teachers for performance from traditional merit pay systems, assuring unions that changes would be pursued through the collective bargaining process.

For environment, Obama proposed a cap and trade auction system to restrict carbon emissions and a ten year program of investments in new energy sources to reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil.[153] Obama proposed that all pollution credits must be auctioned, with no grandfathering of credits for oil and gas companies, and the spending of the revenue obtained on energy development and economic transition costs.[154]

In foreign affairs, Obama was an early opponent of the George W. Bush administration's policies on Iraq.[155] On October 2, 2002, the day President Bush and Congress agreed on the joint resolution authorizing the Iraq War,[156] Obama addressed the first high-profile Chicago anti-Iraq War rally,[157] and spoke out against the war.[158][159] He addressed another anti-war rally in March 2003 and told the crowd that "it's not too late" to stop the war.[160

Obama stated that if elected he would enact budget cuts in the range of tens of billions of dollars, stop investing in "unproven" missile defense systems, not weaponize space, "slow development of Future Combat Systems", and work towards eliminating all nuclear weapons. Obama favors ending development of new nuclear weapons, reducing the current U.S. nuclear stockpile, enacting a global ban on production of fissile material, and seeking negotiations with Russia in order to make it less necessary to have ICBMs on high-alert status.[169]

cnwzlyUID: 2634423

1# qtangtangs

科技类

Planes, trains and automobiles

Jun 19th 2009
From Economist.com

Slowly overcoming the technical barriers to computerised cars will help win psychological acceptance

AN OLD joke among pilots asks: what do you need to fly a modern aeroplane? The answer is a computer, a pilot and a dog. The computer’s job is to fly the plane. The pilot’s job is to feed the dog. The dog’s job is to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything.

It may be an exaggeration, but not by much: most long-haul（持久） flights are handled by autopilots from just after take-off until right before landing. And if the airport has the necessary technology, even the landing can be handed to（一般都不会用到这样的拟人手法） the computer.

Computerised control of transport is not new: the first autopilot, which allows a plane to maintain a steady course without pilot intervention, was developed in 1912.

Trains are going the same way: driverless metro systems（无人驾驶地下轨道系统） exist in several cities. (The Docklands Light Railway in London is a particularly striking example, since passengers can see the entire inside of the carriages, which makes the absence of a driver obvious.)

But considering the number of people who fly or drive them, planes and trains are transport backwaters. Engineers have long dreamed of fully automating the motor car. General Motors’ famous Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair promised fully automatic cars capable of 100mph (160kph), and they have been a staple（主要产品） of futurist predictions ever since.

Two problems have been behind their stubborn no-show: one technical, the other psychological. Computer-driven cars have proved technically more difficult than aeroplanes or trains because of the terrain on which they travel. Aeroplanes spend much of the time in relatively empty skies, and the “stacks” they join while waiting to land at airports are tightly controlled by human decision-makers on the ground.

Flying a plane is simple enough that many modern autopilots use Intel’s veteran 80386 processor—at 24 years old, an antediluvian relic（古老的痕迹）
in computing terms, with less horsepower than the chip found in a modern mobile phone.

Trains, meanwhile, are conceptually simple: they can only move forwards or backwards, and most of the time drivers need only watch for red signals and keep the train moving at the right speed.

Cars are more complicated because they must navigate（行驶在） a road system that is much more extensive and much less standardized than a rail network. Roads are anarchic places compared with railways, which tend to be fenced off. That helps to stop people or animals getting on to the tracks.

An automatic car would have to deal with all sorts of unexpected hazards, from accidents in other cars, to steering clear of emergency-service vehicles, to stopping when a football rolls out into the road—with a child, still hidden from view, in hot pursuit.

Yet engineers are still working on the problem because the advantages are so enticing（诱人的）. Once cars can reliably sense hazards, they will react far faster than people. Communication between cars would allow traffic speeds to be optimized, and avoid the wasteful overtaking and slowing down that people are so fond of (and which helps, paradoxically（荒谬的）, to cause traffic jams).

It could also revolutionize car design. With little need for human input, a car’s traditional layout could be abandoned in favour of sofas, televisions, tables and even beds. That vision is slowly moving towards reality. An

cnwzlyUID: 2634423

17# cnwzly

环境类

Avoiding catastrophes（灾难）

Jun 22nd 2009
From Economist.com

It is easy to destroy an ecosystem（生态系统） but difficult to rebuild it

WHEN John Cabot dropped anchor off the coast of Newfoundland in 1497, his crew reported that they needed only to dip a bucket into the water to catch cod.（背景描述，写环境的） For centuries the fish of the Grand Banks that he had discovered remained in plentiful supply. Even the introduction of modern fishing techniques from the 1950s onwards did not seem to be doing too much harm.

Then, in 1992, the cod population of the Grand Banks suddenly collapsed, throwing 40,000 people out of work. Fisheries ecologists had long warned that the species was threatened by overfishing but their words fell on deaf ears—in part because earlier predictions of doom had proved incorrect. Now their successors are trying to develop ways of telling when a collapse is imminent, in order to avoid crying “wolf” when no wolf is at the door.（狼来了的故事，外国人原来这么说）

To do this in the ocean itself is tricky—the sea is vast and there are lots of variables to contend with. What is required, then, is a model to aid understanding. Steven Carpenter and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, have found one: lakes. A lake is a good place to study ecological changes because it is small, as ecosystems go, and has clear boundaries. Since mid-2008, therefore, Dr Carpenter’s team have been monitoring the health of six lakes in Wisconsin in order to try to understand how ecosystems suddenly flip from one state to another.

They have found, as they hoped they would, that these lakes do indeed switch—usually quickly—from a clear-water state to an algal bloom, in response to fertiliser being added to them. When they are clear, they tend to be full of big fish and smaller creatures that filter water to make it clean. But when the water is cloudy（浑浊） both the fish and the smaller creatures are absent. What might signal that such a switch is imminent? So far Dr Carpenter’s team think that looking for an increase in several statistical characteristics of a lake’s fish and plankton （浮游生物） populations (“variability”, “skewness” and “autocorrelation”, to give their technical names), can predict whether or not an algal bloom will flourish.

On its own, that is interesting. Unfortunately it is not terribly useful for environmental managers on small budgets, because they cannot afford to monitor entire ecosystems continuously. Work by Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, however, suggests they might not need to. Dr Sceffer’s laboratory is full of bottles containing samples of lake water brimming with plankton. Applying appropriate statistical techniques to such samples seems to do a reasonable job of indicating the stability of the lake from which they came.

What is particularly intriguing is the way that the lakes change. They exhibit what is known as hysteresis. That means you can “drip feed” them with fertiliser without causing much visible change until, suddenly, the whole system crashes and a new stable state, dominated by lake algae, emerges. To “uncrash” things it is not enough to push the lake’s chemistry back to where it was just before the flip. You have to go quite a long way past that point to bring back the clear-water ecosystem.

This helps explain why, despite 15 years of conservation efforts, the cod of the Grand Banks have failed to recover. Though it was trawlnets rather than chemistry that caused the system to flip in the first place, the banks have now settled into a new, stable state. They will not easily be forced out of it.

zyp8756UID: 2594775

Both in Cuba and in American policy towards it

AFTER a scintilla of regret over lost youth, to turn 50 should be to enter the prime of life, with a plenitude
of projects and achievements. That is not the case for the Cuban revolution. Fifty years after Fidel Castro
took power and started to impose communism【共产主义】 in Cuba, the island is once again close to bankruptcy【再一次。。。】. “The
accounts don’t square,” Raúl Castro, Fidel’s slightly【轻微的】 younger brother who last year took over as president,
declared this week. His message was that Cubans will have to work harder and longer. Perks such as free
holidays will be scrapped or curtailed.

But the Castro brothers do have one cause for grim【和grin相对 是冷酷的 G词汇】 satisfaction. Later this month George
Bush will
become the tenth American president to leave office without having seen their overthrow【好句子】. That is not for
want of trying: although America has for decades traded with communist regimes in China and Vietnam,
it persists with an economic embargo against Cuba, and under the Helms-Burton act even tries to hinder
Cuba’s trade with other countries in defiance of international law.
The embargo dates from the time when the cold war was hot, and when the contest between the United

States and its Latin American allies (sadly, often dictators) on the one hand, and Soviet communism and
its Cuban beachhead on the other, was fought with guns. But Mr Castro stopped trying to overthrow Latin

American governments more than two decades ago, shortly before his Soviet sponsor【保证人】 collapsed. Nowadays the battle waged across the Florida Straits is largely a propaganda one for influence, especially
in Latin America. In this, because of America’s embargo and its bullying【Q示插入】, the Castros win far more than
they deserve【好】. After all, Cuba has precious little to boast about . It is the only country in the

Americas that locks citizens up for their beliefs【强调句】. In a place that before 1959 boasted as many cattle as
people, meat is such a scarce【缺乏的 不足的】 luxury that it is a crime to kill and eat a cow. Even the health and
education systems, which once put those of many capitalist countries to shame, are now suffering
decline. Then there is Fidel’s claim, earlier this year, that while Cuba has enshrined racial equality,

America is irredeemably racist and would never accept a black man as president.

Obama’s example, and his opportunity

All this means that for the Castros, Barack Obama may turn into a far more formidable foe than his
predecessors. The danger starts with his example: after all, a young, black, progressive politician has no
chance of reaching the highest office in Cuba, although a majority of the island’s people are black. Mr. Obama has already promised to reverse the restrictions【限制】 on remittances and travel by Cuban-Americans
imposed by Mr Bush. Once he is in office, the new president should go further and urge Congress to lift
the embargo altogether. It is wrongheaded and ineffective. If it went, Cubans would know they had

nobody except their rulers to blame for their plight【have nobody except 好】.

Unlike his brother, Raúl Castro shows every sign of recognising that Cuba’s economy needs Chinese-style
market reforms (even if so far he has been slow to implement these). His realism this week doubtless
stems from a realisation【实现】 that low oil prices threaten the bounteous subsidies Cuba has been receiving
from Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. If the embargo goes and economic change is under way,
everything else in Cuba might be up for debate in a way it has not been for the past half century. That
would be a revolution indeed【时态？】.

Brian78UID: 2604416

社会类

The underworked American

AMERICANS like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys. At this time of the year they marvel at the laziness of their European cousins, particularly the French. Did you know that the French take the whole of August off to recover from their 35-hour work weeks? Have you heard that they are so addicted to their holidays that they leave the sick to die and the dead to moulder?

There is an element of exaggeration in this, of course, and not just about French burial habits; studies show that Americans are less Stakhanovite (斯达汉诺夫式的：hardworking)than they think. Still, the average American gets only four weeks of paid leave a year compared with seven for the French and eight for the Germans. In Paris many shops simply close down for August; in Washington, where the weather is sweltering(酷热的), they remain open, some for 24 hours a day.

But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.

Americans also divide up their school time oddly（奇怪地）. They cram （塞满）the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, “summer learning loss”. This pedagogical（教学法的） understretch（基础） is exacerbating （加剧）social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.

The understretch is also leaving American children ill-equipped to compete. They usually perform poorly in international educational tests, coming behind Asian countries that spend less on education but work their children harder. California’s state universities have to send over a third of their entering class to take remedial（补救的） courses in English and maths. At least a third of successful PhD students come from abroad.

A growing number of politicians from both sides of the aisle（走廊） are waking up to the problem. Barack Obama has urged school administrators to “rethink the school day”, arguing that “we can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home ploughing the land at the end of each day.” Newt Gingrich has trumpeted（宣传） a documentary arguing that Chinese and Indian children are much more academic than American ones.

These politicians have no shortage of evidence that America’s poor educational performance is weakening its economy. A recent report from McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the lagging performance of the country’s school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, has wreaked（发泄，报仇） more devastation on the economy than the current recession（不景气）.

Learning the lesson
A growing number of schools are already doing what Mr Obama urges, and experimenting with lengthening the school day. About 1,000 of the country’s 90,000 schools have broken the shackles（束缚） of the regular school day. In particular, charter（宪章） schools in the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) start the school day at 7.30am and end at 5pm, hold classes on some Saturdays and teach for a couple of weeks in the summer. All in all, KIPP students get about 60% more class time than their peers and routinely（例行公事地） score better in tests.

Still, American schoolchildren are unlikely to end up working as hard as the French, let alone the South Koreans, any time soon. There are institutional（制度上的） reasons for this. The federal government has only a limited influence over the school system. Powerful interest groups, most notably the teachers’ unions, but also the summer-camp industry, have a vested（既定的） interest in the status quo. But reformers are also up against powerful cultural forces.

One is sentimentality; the archetypical American child is Huckleberry Finn, who had little taste for formal education. Another is complacency（满足，安心）. American parents have led grass-root（一般民众的） protests against attempts to extend the school year into August or July, or to increase the amount of homework their little darlings have to do. They still find it hard to believe that all those Chinese students, beavering away at their books, will steal their children’s jobs. But Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884. And brain work is going the way of manual work, to whoever will provide the best value for money. The next time Americans make a joke about the Europeans and their taste for la dolce vita, they ought to take a look a bit closer to home.

cnwzlyUID: 2634423

文艺类

Hippie Picasso

Jun 27th 2009
From Economist.com

Why is late Picasso enjoying a surge in demand?

In London this week, Sotheby’s and Christie’s held their regular June auctions of Impressionist and Modern Art. Christie’s evening sale realised a total of £37m ($60.4m), while Sotheby’s brought in £33.5m. Although Sotheby’s revenue was lower, it was deemed the greater success as their auction had a higher sell-through rate—85% by lot and 91% by value versus Christie’s 68% by lot and 84% by value. For auction houses, prices are significant but unscuppered trades are the imperative.

The result of a “tough gathering season”, as Christie’s Thomas Seydoux put it, the auctions were well-pruned affairs featuring respectable works at relatively modest prices. Collectors have a particularly strong attachment to their masterpieces in times of trouble; it’s much easier to part with works when auction houses offer guarantees. This week, the only work singled out for a guarantee—specifically, an “irrevocable bid”, the newer, happier term used to describe a third-party guarantee—was a 1969 painting by Pablo Picasso.

To the relief of that anonymous guarantor, “Late Picasso” was one of the week’s success stories.
Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s offered paintings titled “Homme à l’épée”, which featured a sword-carrying musketeer painted by Picasso in his 88th year. Christie’s slightly larger, predominantly white canvas had been acquired in 2005 for £2.7m. It sold on Tuesday for £5.8m. A nice return. Sotheby’s mainly red oil on board, which had been used on the poster of an important Avignon exhibition, achieved the even higher price of £7m on Wednesday.讲了一个销售的奇迹

Why, contrary to the general slide in art prices, is late Picasso enjoying a surge in demand? Helena Newman of Sotheby’s says, “Twenty years ago, works from the Blue, Rose, Cubist and Classical periods were considered the art historical pinnacle and the height of what collectors wanted. Now there is a broader focus on the full range of Picasso's work: the portraits of Dora Maar and Marie Therese, the still lives of the 1940s, the late paintings.” She adds, “Picasso is unrivalled in having produced great works in every decade of his creative output.”时代变化了人们的审美也变了

Olivier Camu, a Christie’s specialist, suggests that these works are a stylistic bridge between modern and contemporary art that attracts crossover buyers. “Whereas classic Picasso collectors tended to turn up their nose at the late works, collectors of Abstract Expressionists and even 1980s expressionists like Jean-Michel Basquiat are attracted to both the aesthetics and relatively reasonable prices of these big, bold, colourful pictures.”

Giovanna Bertazzoni（佳士得印象派和现代艺术部负责人Giovanna Bertazzoni）, Co-Head of Impressionist and Modern at Christie’s, points to a flurry of big museum shows and identifies a general curatorial re-evaluation of the artist’s oeuvre. Previously the 1960s paintings had been perceived as the childish scribbles or doddering fantasies of an old man warding off impotence. However, essays such as “Peace and Love Picasso” by Dakin Hart, which was published in a recent Gagosian Gallery catalogue, argue that the musketeer paintings were not only in dialogue with old masters such as Rembrandt and Velasquez, but with the youth of their time. Picasso, a pacifist since his “Guernica” days and the kind of free-spirit to empathise with the Summer of Love, developed his own pictorial “Musketeer Counter-culture,” according to Mr Hart.

The taste of a younger generation would seem to be integral to understanding the fashionability of late Picasso. “Younger collectors want paintings that are informal, splashy, less academic,” suggests Gabriel Safdie, a Geneva-based dealer. “They are not interested in sombre easel painting or dry Cubist exercises.”

The musketeer on the block at Sotheby’s was acquired by Samir Traboulsi, a Lebanese financier, while Christie’s swashbuckler was purchased by David Nahmad, a currency trader and powerful art dealer. With his family, Mr Nahmad owns several hundred Picassos, and has been buying late Picassos since the early 1970s when they sold for $40,000-50,000. “Blue period, Dora Maar, Marie Therese... it’s like Mayfair, Chelsea and Knightsbridge real estate,” says Mr Nahmad. “There are fashions but, overall, everything goes up.”

In the past, the Nahmads have been suspected of supporting the price of Picassos at auction in order to maintain the value of their inventory. “All manipulators lose money,” counters Mr Nahmad. “If I died tomorrow, the Picasso market would go on.” He is so passionate about the artist's work that he loves buying Picassos that he has owned before. “The art market is something for beauty and intelligence,” he says. “It’s not supposed to be a casino.”

cnwzlyUID: 2634423

社会类

The moderator's closing remarks

Jun 24th 2009 |

This has been a debate with an unexpected twist. A motion that had been deliberately framed to be provocative seems instead to have struck a chord with the vast majority of our contributors from the floor. They feel that a fixed, mandatory retirement age is outdated and have offered a wealth of personal stories to support that view. But most participants also understand that Economist readers may be unusual in that many of them enjoy their jobs and have opportunities to work on well beyond the normal retirement age. The same may not be true for manual workers who may be tired out and unable to carry on by the time they reach 60 or 65.

Whatever their differences, almost everyone agrees that future retirement arrangements will have to become much more flexible. We were fortunate to have as one of our guest speakers Ros Altmann, an investment banker and pensions expert, who has given a lot of thought to this point. We need to reinvent retirement, she argues, so that it becomes a gradual process, not a single event. By adjusting their working patterns and their hours, many people should be able to remain economically active into their 60s and 70s, contributing their skills and experience for much longer than they do now, helping the economy and enjoying themselves as they do so.一个女学究说要通过同坐方式的改变来让每个人的工作经验和技能在60-70岁时还能服务于社会大众

Our other guest speaker, Peter Diamond, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Economics, usefully reminds us that retirement policy will always be tricky to design because it has to strike the best balance between a multiplicity of objectives, including poverty relief, redistribution, insurance, smoothing consumption over a lifetime and eliminating distortions. 说明了退休制度的影响Not all of them can be fully achieved at the same time. But people's behaviour in retirement responds to sensible incentives, which makes him think that fixing pension systems should be relatively easy—much easier than fixing health-care systems.

In his closing statement, Christian Weller argues much the same thing: that the policy agenda for fixing retirement is pretty straightforward. It requires modernising public pension systems, offering employers greater predictability for their pension contributions and making it easier for people to save in individual retirement accounts. Some may disagree with Christian Weller's assessment that this can be quickly and easily accomplished, particularly if the standard retirement age is to remain in the mid-60s, as he says it should. But many would concur that public-sector pensions, which currently offer a much better deal than most private-sector ones, have to become more equitable. And he is surely right that most people do not have the time and knowledge to make sensible investment decisions for their retirement pots, so there should be automatic default options that would save them from their own mistakes (though those who want to do something different should still be able to do so).对退休金的要求

George Magnus, for his part, remains convinced that the system needs more than tweaking. Population ageing represents a structural change, he says, which demands a structural response, such as extending working lives. The demographic changes now in progress have made employment and labour-market practices designed in the 1950s and 1960s unsustainable. Replacing them with more flexible arrangements will not only be better for the economies concerned but enrich individual lives as well. He cites a recent Harris poll in which between half and two-thirds of the respondents in most rich countries said they would be prepared to work beyond the statutory retirement age.人口结构变化使得人们的工作时间也要变化了，而大多数发达国家的人也做好了延长工作年龄的准备

Certainly that seems to be the position of most of our contributors from the floor. Still, since the debate opened, some voters have been persuaded to shift from supporting the motion to opposing it. John Sanderson speaks for many when he says that if people cannot think of anything better to do with their lives except to carry on as before, they must lack imagination. People of his generation, he explains, do not want to retire: they want to be active and productive. But they want to do something different—do another degree, sail round the world, practise the violin more, even start a business—and they want to do it their way.

All the arguments have been laid out before you. This is your last chance to cast your vote.恐吓。。。。

银落UID: 2632560

From The Economist print edition

MOST people spend nearly a third of their lives asleep. Until the invention of the electric lightbulb, they had little choice. Artificial light was dim and dear, so people rose with the lark and went to bed soon after dark. But for the past century or so, synthetic daylight has been available round the clock, and there is plenty to do at any time of day or night. For most people in rich countries, the 24-hour society has arrived. Sleeping at night, therefore, is no longer the default option. Many people decide that to make more room for other pursuits, they can do with less sleep.

But is this a wise choice? Cutting back on sleep is a huge mistake, says a small but vocal band of sleep scientists, most of them in America. Their doyen, William Dement, founder and director of the Stanford University Sleep Research Centre, reckons that people on average now sleep one-and-a-half hours a night less than they did a century ago, at great cost to their health and safety (though others dispute this figure).…


The moderator's opening remarksApr 21st 2009 | Ms Alison Goddard

、、、、
People generally spend about a third of their lives asleep. A century ago, they had little choice. Artificial light was dim and little could be accomplished by it. So people went to bed soon after dark and rose with the lark. The invention of the electric light bulb changed all this. (可以褒义可以贬义) Now it is perfectly possible to get on with useful—and, perhaps more entertainingly, frivolous—pursuits during the hours of darkness. The advice handed down from grandmother, to get at least eight hours of sleep a night, with an hour before midnight being worth two after, goes unheeded. What are the consequences of ignoring her counsel?
、、、、

Staying awake for longer obviously enables people to achieve more. As students around the globe will attest, revising for examinations into the early hours boosts the grades attained. Indeed, many students are reported to take stimulants such as Ritalin and Modafinil in order to stay alert for longer. But at some stage, sleep becomes vital. It is not only essential to restore alertness; sleep is also critical for learning as well as many other measures of well-being, both physical and mental.

Involuntary insomnia, perhaps brought on by economic anxiety, achieves little. Spending several wakeful hours staring in frustration at a darkened ceiling is no one's idea of fun.（挺有意思的表达，虽然好像考试的时候用不到） People who suffer from insomnia tend not only to be tired and perform less well in the workplace but also to be depressed. Some studies show that people who take sleeping pills are sicker than those who do not.

Are we getting enough sleep? The question has bothered many distinguished thinkers for decades. We are privileged to have two great authorities to discuss the issue. Robert Stickgold of the Harvard Medical School argues that people who do not get enough shut-eye become "fat, sick and stupid" as a result. Dan Kripke of the University of California, San Diego, reckons that too much sleep has similar consequences. Let the debate commence.

Frivolous 轻浮的，琐碎的
Unheeded 无人理睬的
Privileged 享有特权的

银落UID: 2632560

The proposer's opening remarksApr 21st 2009 | Dr Robert Stickgold


Are we getting enough sleep? While the answer to this question obviously depends on who "we" are, and what "enough" means,（很好的句式，可以用在引出对某个词的定义） the bulk of the scientific evidence supports a resounding "No". We need more sleep.

Let me summarise what I am going to tell you: you are probably not getting enough sleep, and you know it. If sleepiness doesn't kill you on the highways, the consequences of inadequate sleep are going to dramatically increase the likelihood that you end up fat,（很好的不用even if 的一种让步句式） sick and stupid. Let us look at these claims one at a time.（一次性）

First, we know that we are not getting enough sleep. Of among 100,000 randomly selected individuals enrolled in a telephone survey, a quarter reported that they "did not get enough rest or sleep" on at least half of the previous 30 nights. Of those 18-34 years of age, the number was even higher, at 33%, and 10% of all respondents reported never getting enough. So we know from our own experience that（我的argu一定会用你这句句子的，用于引出常识） we are not getting enough sleep. Caffeine consumption is another measure of our sleepiness. After oil, coffee is the largest traded commodity on the world markets in terms of total dollar amount.（一个极好的例子，用于不眠的人们总是不停的工作） Americans alone drink over 300 million cups of coffee a day, and that number ignores caffeinated soft drinks. We clearly know that we are not getting enough sleep and are desperately（拼命的） self-medicating ourselves in the hope of waking up.
先引例子，然后说we know from our own experience 开始说明一个事实，然后再从别的角度引例子，再次论证我们睡眠不足—这一事实。估计下面要说理了。】

Our daytime sleepiness is killing us on the road. Recent analyses of vehicular deaths suggest that sleepiness is as big a culprit as alcohol. Shifting to daylight savings time in the spring, when Americans lose just one hour of sleep over a weekend, leads to a 9% increase in automobile accidents the following day. This is not due to just a few short sleepers. 37% of Americans admit having fallen asleep at the wheel at least once, and 6% report having done so in the last six months. So despite（又一个很好的让步） our use of caffeine to help keep us awake, our sleepiness is killing us on the highways. (Forgive me if most of the data I present is for Americans, but most studies have been carried out in the United States.)

There is a common misperception that（这个句式可以用于argu里面的概念混淆） all that sleep does is cure sleepiness. But sleep is a time when the body and brain actively prepare for the next day. Every year, more evidence comes out about the importance of adequate sleep in maintaining our health and sanity. Just some of these studies should prove the point.
睡眠的作用

For a start, sleep is critical for the effective operation of the immune system. So if you do not get enough sleep, you will probably get sick more often. In one study, subjects who stayed up all night after getting immunised against hepatitis ended up producing only half as much antibody against the virus as those who slept normally. In another study, participants who reported sleeping, on average, less than seven hours a night were three times more likely to get sick, when exposed to a cold virus, than those who averaged eight hours or more.
睡眠的重要—原因一immune system.

Adequate sleep is also critical for maintaining normal glucose metabolism and for preventing both obesity and type II diabetes. Our feelings of hunger and satiety are controlled by two opposing hormones, ghrelin and leptin; high ghrelin levels and low leptin levels make us feel hungry. When subjects were restricted to five hours of sleep a night for a week, their leptin levels dropped by 17% and ghrelin increased 28%, despite food intake being rigorously maintained at a constant level. With unrestrained eating, these changes would normally lead to the consumption of an extra 1,000 Kcal of food, half of your normal daily intake. Indeed, when subjects in another study were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, their desire for high carbohydrate (read "junk") food went up 32%.
睡眠的重要—原因二maintain normal glucose metabolism and preventing obesity and diabetes.

These same studies showed that with inadequate sleep, glucose regulation goes awry. Subjects whose sleep had been restricted to five hours a night showed signs that normally presage the onset of diabetes after less than a week of restricted sleep. But these are experimental subjects. Wouldn't people who normally sleep less get used to it? Don't their bodies adjust? Apparently not.(这篇文章对argu真是很有帮助啊~。。这句可以用在research的subjects上面
Subjects who normally sleep no more than 6.5 hours a night show 40% higher insulin sensitivity than those sleeping eight hours, levels that reflect a significant risk of diabetes.
睡眠的重要—原因三glucose regulation goes awry

But inadequate sleep also impairs mental functioning. As the most basic level, inadequate sleep leads to poor attention. Limiting sleep to just seven hours in bed for a week leads to a dramatic decrease in the ability of individuals to maintain sustained attention.（连续的注意力） On a simple test of attention, a quarter of subjects restricted to six hours per day in bed fell asleep during testing, taking over 30 seconds to respond to the appearance of an obvious signal on their computer screen. Interestingly, although subjects perceived their performance as stabilising after three days, it actually continued to deteriorate across the entire week of sleep restriction.
睡眠的重要—原因四impairs mental functioning。从physical level 到mental level上来了。

Attention is not the only cognitive impairment produced by inadequate sleep. Learning and memory are also affected. Memories formed and skills learned during the day are stabilised, enhanced and integrated with other memories and skills during sleep the following night. For example, with a visual skill learning task, individuals actually improve over a night of sleep, performing better the next day. But this improvement is in proportion to how much sleep they obtain in excess of six hours. Twice as much improvement was seen with eight hours of sleep than with seven hours, and no improvement was seen with six or less. More recent studies suggest that REM sleep, which is most prominent at the very end of the night, is critical for integrating newly learned information into our larger networks of pre-existing memories, helping us make meaning out of the events of the preceding day. Getting less than eight hours
may prevent this crucial work from being done.
Cognitive 的另外一些respect，attention，learning and memory

So it is most likely literally (=indeed) true that if you are getting less than the eight hours of sleep your body is asking for, both your body and your mind will pay the price.

Resounding 响亮的 彻底的
Summarise 总结
Satiety 吃得太饱
Rigorously 严厉地

银落UID: 2632560

The opposition's opening remarksApr 21st 2009 | Dr Daniel Kripke


Most of us get enough sleep. A fair percentage even spend too long in bed, but there is wide diversity among us. (赞一下，一直都在想different people have different thoughts这种话怎么写得好看，这句话很厉害，再自己打一遍，there is wide diversity among us) For most people, there is no persuasive evidence that spending more time in bed would be good for them or for the folks around them.
一上来就表明观点—we have enough sleep, and maybe over.

These days, adults in the United States and much of Europe say they sleep an average of 6.5-7.5 hours a night. In study after study, people who sleep 6.5-7.4 hours live the longest, so most people are getting enough sleep. People who report sleeping five or six hours live almost as long. In fact, people who sleep five or six hours may live a bit longer than people who sleep eight hours. People who sleep five or six hours live considerably longer than the person who sleeps nine hours or more. With the best survival among those with rather short sleep durations, it would be hard to prove that increasing sleep time would be good for most people.

By the majority of measures, those with average or short sleep seem healthier also. Recent results from the Hordaland study in Norway showed that working people who reported sleeping less than 6.5 hours a night did not suffer any significant increase in disability. Those who reported more than 8.5 hours were more than twice as likely to become disabled as those who slept 6.5-7.5 hours. Those who slept 7.5-8.5 hours were slightly more likely to become disabled (not significant). The suggestion from this study was that, if anything,（极好的插入语，在新概念里我也看到过一次，如果还有的话，甚至于。。） spending more time in bed might tend to increase disability.

To give more examples,（在issue里面可以用排比的例子） the six-hour sleeper is less likely to develop diabetes than the nine-hour sleeper. The six-hour sleeper is less likely to have a stroke than the long sleeper. Incidentally（附带的）, I have not been able to find evidence that people who sleep more than average earn more money or do more to help other people. Quite the opposite.

You might think that more sleep would be good for mood, but those who sleep nine or ten hours tend to be very depressed. A counter-intuitive surprise is that sleep deprivation actually improves mood, at least in the short run.（这种转折方式也很新奇）

Insomnia is not mainly a problem of short sleep:（可以用在issue里面的挖深，引出本质问题） those with more than average sleep frequently report insomnia. Moreover, the false belief that people generally need eight hours of sleep is one of the common causes of insomnia. Spending less time in bed is an important solution for many with insomnia.

Nobody seems to know exactly where the idea that we should sleep eight hours came from. I guess it was just passed down from somebody's grandmother.

It turns out that many of the chief proponents of more sleep are being paid by the sleeping-pill industry. The industry thinks that campaigns for more sleep increase sleeping-pill sales. Some people imagine that sleeping pills help them cope on the following day, but the majority of objective studies show that sleeping pills have no benefit for next-day performance or even make behaviour worse. A recent 20-year study from Sweden showed that men who took sleeping pills had even more early deaths and more cancer than those who smoked cigarettes. There have been 16 other studies showing excess mortality among sleeping-pill users. Perhaps epidemiologic studies do not necessarily prove that sleeping pills cause mortality, but the pharmaceutical industry has done randomising controlled trials（randomising controlled trials 很好的词） showing that sleeping pills increase depression and infection, and probably increase the likelihood of cancer.

We should be worried that many disasters are caused by mistakes made in the early hours of the morning: the Chernobyl and Three-Mile-Island nuclear melt-downs, the Bhopal disaster, Exxon Valdez and so forth. Work shifts between midnight and 6 am produce increased numbers of minor and serious errors. Night work does curtail sleep, which is part of the problem, but the main difficulty is that night workers try to function when the body clock is lowering alertness and the metabolism. （再一次让步）The circadian rhythm problem in night work is more important than the element of（可以用在argu的另一个因素更为重要） sleep loss, so these causes should be distinguished（接着上面一句配合使用）. Moreover, for many shift workers, the issue is that they are unable to sleep enough during the day, and too little is known about how their sleep disturbances could be managed. As modern economies increase the percentage of night workers, much more research is needed to find solutions for the problems of shift workers.

Similarly, after midnight vehicle accident rates are very high. Here again the impairment may come more from the downside of circadian rhythms than from any acute sleep loss. Many road accidents are caused by young lads who have been abusing alcohol or other substances as well as staying up much too late. I have seen no convincing evidence that the person who regularly averages six hours of sleep a night has more accidents than the person who sleeps eight hours. There is some evidence that nine-hour sleepers are a danger on the road.

Of course, there are people in particular situations who should get more sleep. Research shows that doctors and nurses make more mistakes when their work hours are too long to allow enough sleep. I would prefer that their schedules provided adequate sleep.
这段是分类讨论，承认the opposite同时让自己的point更加完整

Years ago, a small Navy submarine sank in San Diego Bay, possibly due to a mistake by a sailor whose commanders had allowed him only 4-5 hours' sleep for weeks. His commander testified at the court-martial that such sleep schedules were routine on nuclear submarines. I would prefer that the fellows with their fat fingers on the nuclear red buttons were getting more sleep. Stressed doctors, nurses and submariners are some of the exceptions to the general point that most people sleep enough.

For most people, this debate's proposition that we do not get enough sleep is misguided.

Randomizing 随机的

wildrose800331UID: 2602131

政治类 社会类

Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2009. The son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, he is the first African-American to ascend to the highest office in the land.

He is also the first new president since terrorists attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, the first to use the Internet to decisive political advantage, the first to insist on handling a personal smartphone while in the White House. So striking was the unlikeliness of his candidacy that he embraced that aspect, calling himself "a skinny kid with a funny name" and making "change" the theme for his campaign.

It was a theme with deep resonance for a country enmeshed in what was widely believed to be the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Abroad, many challenges loomed: the war in Iraq, the worsening conflict in Afghanistan, the repercussions from Israel's broad assault on Gaza, the threat of terrorism and the increasing signs that the economic woes that began on Wall Street had spread across the global economy.

Mr. Obama arrived at the White House with a resume that appeared short by presidential standards: eight years in the Illinois State Senate, four years as a senator in Washington. He had managed to wrest the Democratic nomination from a field of far more experienced competitors, most notably Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he outlasted in what became an epic primary battle. And he defeated Senator John McCain, the Republican of Arizona, by an electoral margin of 365 to 173, while outpolling him by more than eight million votes.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama laid out a set of large promises that were solidly within the traditional agenda of the Democratic Party, with plans to offer health insurance to all and reduce carbon emissions at the top of the list. At the same time, he proposed moving toward what was sometimes called a post-partisan landscape, appealing to voters of all stripes to come together. As he took office, voters seemed cautiously optimistic, with high hopes for the Obama presidency mixed with a sense that complicated problems would take yea rs to resolve.

The Obama administration's early months in office were dominated by a single issue: the economy. In fact, the economy's seemingly relentless slide in late 2008 began reshaping the Obama team's plans long before Inauguration Day, as first the candidate and then the president-elect was pulled in  to discussions over whether to bail out the financial system, and then into the raging debate over whether and how to keep General Motors and Chrysler from going under.

Mr. Obama's first major initiative was a gigantic stimulus package to pump money into an economy in something close to free fall. He introduced the outlines of a plan before taking office, and spent much of his first weeks engaged in negotiations with Congress that led to the passage of a $787 billion bill. Republicans derided the bill as unaffordable and wasteful. Not a single Republican in the House voted for the package, and only three Republican Senators did -- just enough for Mr. Obama to avert a filibuster.

On Feb. 26, Mr. Obama unveiled a 10-year budget, including $3.5 trillion for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, that envisioned far-reaching plans to reshape the nation's economic landscape, by promoting fundamental changes in health care, education and energy policy.

Mr. Obama faced some criticism for having so crowded an agenda when the economic woes of the country were so pressing. On the auto bailout, he chose not to appoint a "car czar,'' essentially taking on that position himself with the aid of a car industry task force. Mr. Obama took an aggressive line with G.M. and Chrysler, forcing out G.M.'s chairman, Rick Wagoner, rejecting both companies' recovery plans and setting deadlines, backed up by a bankruptcy threat, for forcing radical changes. The bank bailout plan devised by Treasury Secretary Timothy H. Geithner, on the other hand, called for creating a public-private partnership for buying up hundreds of billions in so-called "toxic assets.'' Mr. Obama and Mr. Geithner also unveiled a $75 billion plan for reducing foreclosures.

Overseas, Mr. Obama quickly reshaped policy on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, he set a date of August 2010 for a pullout of most troops. He ordered that 21,000 additional troops be sent to Afghanistan, significantly stepping up American military involvement. Pakistan became a new focus of administration attention, as the Taliban continued to seize ever-larger swaths of the country's western regions.

On his second day in office, Mr. Obama issued executive orders banning torture and closing the secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency. In April, he released memos from the Bush administration Justice Department that authorized brutal treatment of so-called "high value'' terrorism suspects, a move that led to calls for an independent investigation of detainee policy -- calls that Mr. Obama rebuffed（严厉拒绝）.

wildrose800331UID: 2602131

Times   丑闻 政治类

Mark Sanford

Mary Ann Chastain/Associated Press

Updated: July 1, 2009

Mark Sanford is the Republican governor of South Carolina. He had been known primarily for his vehement (fierce, violent, intense) opposition to President Obama's stimulus bill until he disappeared for a week in June 2009, infuriating (= irritate, enrage) members of the state legislature. On June 24, after being confronted by a reporter as he got off a plane from Buenos Aires, he held a news conference in which he admitted to having an extra-marital affair with a woman in Argentina. He later disclosed other flirtations.

Governor Sanford confirmed that he had been in Buenos Aires, not hiking on the Appalachian Trail as he told his staff. In revealing the affair that had gone on for about a year -- and which he had disclosed to his wife, Jenny, five months ago -- he said: "This was selfishness on my part." His Argentine mistress was identified as María Belén Chapur.

Mr. Sanford announced that he was resigning his position as chairman of the Republican Governors Association. When he acknowledged, two days later, that he had visited Ms. Chapur in Argentina in 2008 during a taxpayer-funded trip, top Republicans in the state joined in a rising chorus for him to resign.

The furor(狂怒
骚动) over the governor's whereabouts（所在的地方） began on June 22, when his staff acknowledged that they could not reach him. His wife told the Associated Press that he had gone somewhere over the Father's Day weekend, but she did not know where and she was not concerned. The next night, at 10 p.m., his staff sent a "high priority" e-mail alert to reporters that Mr. Sanford was hiking the Appalachian Trail, a 2,100-mile path that does not pass through South Carolina.

The following morning, a reporter for The State newspaper of Columbia, S.C., acting on a tip, staked out a returning flight from Buenos Aires at the Atlanta airport and confronted the governor. In the interview, Mr. Sanford said he had taken an unplanned trip to recharge after a difficult legislative session.

He had considered hiking the trail, he said. "But I said 'no'; I wanted to do something exotic," he told The State. "It's a great city."

After Mr. Sanford's press conference, Ms. Sanford, 46, issued a statement saying that while she loves her husband, she asked him to leave the family two weeks ago in a trial separation, though she still believes the marriage can be repaired.

"We reached a point where I felt it was important to look my sons in the eyes and maintain my dignity, self-respect and my basic sense of right and wrong," she said. Because of the separation, she said, she had not known where he was.

On June 25, Mr. Sanford said that he would reimburse（退款，补偿） the state for the cost of his travel to Argentina in 2008 as part of a Latin America tour described at the time as an economic development venture. Documents suggested the amount was roughly $12,000.

"While the purpose of this trip was an entirely professional and appropriate business development trip," Mr. Sanford said in an e-mail statement issued by his office, "I made a mistake while I was there in meeting with the woman who I was unfaithful to my wife with."

The South Carolina Commerce Department said Mr. Sanford had spent most of the trade mission in Brazil, and an itinerary it provided showed that he had met with government officials and with executives of various biofuel companies.

Officials of the United States Commerce Department said they had helped Mr. Sanford arrange several meetings in Argentina through the United States Embassy there. His itinerary shows that while he was in Buenos Aires, he met with the president of Citibank Argentina, Juan Bruchou, and took a helicopter ride to meet with Daniel Osvaldo Scioli, governor of the region.

But a schedule for the trip provided by the South Carolina Commerce Department shows that Mr. Sanford's itinerary in Argentina was much lighter than in Brazil. His schedule was free on two of the four days he spent there, and was open every evening.

E-mail messages between Mr. Sanford and Ms. Chapur indicate that the trip, from June 21 to 28, coincided with what the two describe in the e-mail as the consummation（= completion, fulfillment） of their affair.

On June 30, 2009, when concerns seemed to be abating( reducing) , Mr. Stanford said he had visited with Ms. Chapur more times than he initially disclosed and that he had had inappropriate flirtations with several other women as well. None of the other relationships "crossed the line," he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Mr. Sanford's political future -- he had been mentioned in 2008 as a possible running mate for Senator John McCain, and had moved up on to 2009's short list of potential Republican presidential contenders( 竞争者) in 2012 -- clearly was clouded. Across South Carolina, politicians of both parties were reeling from his disclosure, which was followed up by the publications of e-mails between Mr. Sanford and his mistress. In newspapers and on talk shows, debate raged over whether the governor should resign amid personal turmoil（混乱）. The June 30 disclosures put his ability to remain governor in doubt.

His standing within state government, already sapped（debilitated）by battles with Republicans and Democrats alike, had sunk even further, members of the legislature said. Previously, Democrats and Republicans alike saw advantages to his remaining in office. The Democrats were all too happy to see Mr. Sanford stay through the 2010 governor's race, so they could link him to his fellow Republicans. Political advisers to most Republicans preparing to run in the 2010 primary were also not eager to see him go. His resignation would most likely give an advantage to one expected Republican primary candidate in particular, Lt. Gov. R. André Bauer. Should Mr. Sanford resign, Mr. Bauer would succeed him and be able to run as the incumbent（在职者）.乖乖
又虚拟
又倒装的

The governor's latest revelations（泄露，启示） make it harder for him to put the scandal behind him.

Mr. Sanford recently lost a high-profile battle to reject $700 million in federal stimulus funding that he said should be spent instead on reducing the state deficit. After challenging the Obama administration, federal courts and the state legislature on the issue, he backed down (= give up)
on June 8 and requested the funding.

The governor has maintained that his primary concern in fighting the stimulus money was not to raise his national profile for a presidential run but to strengthen the executive office in South Carolina, where the governor has few powers. But he took his stand against the stimulus so far -- appearing on national talk shows and even writing an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled "Don't Bail Out My State" -- that it resulted in an order from the state supreme court that he do the legislature's bidding.

His conservative home state was divided over his stance, with some people worried that the state was becoming a national laughingstock while others cheered the governor as a bulwark(=barricade, earthwork) against what they called liberal spending policies and the expansion of the welfare state. Teachers and educators marched on the capital in protest against the governor's refusal to accept the funds.

Mr. Sanford has long been known as an iconoclast(反对崇拜偶像者). As a congressman（国会议员）, he slept on a futon（=carpet）
in his office. To showcase his opposition to pork-barrel spending, he once brought two live piglets onto the floor of the state legislature.

Adapted from National Journal's 2008 Almanac of American Politics:

Mark Sanford, a Republican and something of a maverick(无党派的政治家), was elected governor of South Carolina in 2002.

In 1994, 1st District incumbent Arthur Ravenel ran for governor, and Sanford, with no political experience, ran for the House. In the House Sanford voted more often than almost any other member against spending increases. He was one of the few members voting against measures passed by nearly unanimous（全体一致的） votes and he opposed what he considered pork barrel spending, including projects in South Carolina. He spent much of late 1999 and early 2000 campaigning for John McCain across the state, as did Lindsey Graham, even though most state Republican insiders backed George W. Bush.

Read More...

Back in South Carolina full-time in 2001 Sanford started running for governor. Well known and well liked in Charleston and the coast, he was unknown in the rest of the state, and he set about getting better acquainted. His ultimate target was Governor Jim Hodges, the Democrat who had upset Republican incumbent David Beasley in 1998. His job ratings were not particularly high, and Republicans were confident they could beat "the accidental governor," as some called him, in this basically Republican state. Hodges had more money, but Sanford seemed to attract more attention. Dressed usually in khakis and a plaid（格子） shirt, he talked about his plans for change and getting away from politics as usual. In November Sanford won 53%-47%.

As governor, Sanford continued to defy convention. He instituted an "open door at four" policy: citizens could line up to get five-minute audiences with the governor (they sometimes went longer). After the departure of his chief of staff, he brought in his wife Jenny, a former investment banker who ran her husband's campaigns, to temporarily fill the void（=空缺，vacancy） though both denied she would be chief of staff. Sanford wondered out loud whether he should quit the Air Force Reserve, which he joined in 2002 just prior to running for governor, lest he（should）be called to active duty; he decided to stay in and arranged that Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer should become acting governor. He was not called up but did spend two weeks in the spring in training. In 2005, he spent two weeks in Texas training as a medical evacuation(疏散) officer and missed the opening of the legislative session. He was later transferred to another unit, the Air Force's National Security Emergency Preparedness Agency.

From the legislature he asked some pretty major changes: abolishing the elective offices of secretary of state, treasurer, comptroller（主计长）, adjutant （associate, deputy） general, superintendent(= supervisor) of education and agriculture commissioner, and putting their functions under the governor; putting the state universities, accustomed to lobbying for themselves, under a single board of regents(董事);; enacting school vouchers ("education passports") for children in failing schools. Sanford managed to lower the DUI blood alcohol threshold to .08, win campaign finance changes that added more transparency and bring the Division of Motor Vehicles directly under the governor's office, but he failed to enact any of his major initiatives in his first year.

That was the beginning of a strained relationship with the Republican-controlled legislature. South Carolina's governorship is constitutionally weak and the legislature relatively strong; Sanford struggled to work within these confines. He frequently pointed out that he was the first governor in 50 years not to have come out of the legislature or state government, an observation that was obvious from his approach. After the failure of his plan in 2003 to swap a phase out of the income tax for an increase in the cigarette tax, Sanford promised to visit districts of lawmakers from both parties who did not support the plan and vetoed local issue bills that were routinely signed in the past. He angered legislators by commissioning a poll to measure his personal popularity against theirs. In 2004, Sanford again pursued an ambitious agenda, advocating tax credits for families who send their children to private schools, transfer them to another public school or home-school them. He called for worker's compensation reform, government restructuring, increasing the number of charter schools, containing health insurance costs and for a capital access program that would encourage financial institutions lend to small businesses. His tax plan drew the most attention; he proposed a 15 percent reduction in income taxes, offset by a 5-cent sales tax on lottery tickets and a 61-cent tax increase on a pack of cigarettes.

The General Assembly, primarily the Senate, again balked at his proposals. Sanford did little to placate recalcitrant legislators. He issued 106 budget vetoes to cut spending and the House overrode 105 of them. He also vetoed an economic development bill that began as the Life Sciences Act, offering tax incentives to biotech and medical research companies. Though he once supported the economic development initiative, he objected to various projects that legislators tacked onto the final bill; the legislature overwhelmingly overrode his veto. He angered legislators in the final week of the five-month legislative session by sneaking two piglets into the State House to symbolize the legislative appetite for pork. The pigs defecated on the carpet; the public, it turned out, loved the stunt. Another veto came in December, aimed at a property tax bill that would have capped valuation increases. Sanford cited the bill's unintended consequences and was applauded by the state Chamber of Commerce and the state School Boards Association.

Sanford's penchant for showmanship again surfaced in March 2005 when he brought a horse and buggy to the State House entrance to draw attention to his efforts to restructure government. "We have a system of government in this state that to a large extent is still stuck in 1895," he said. In May, he launched another round of vetoes, issuing 163 budget vetoes this time. In 2006, his battles with the legislature continued and so did the stunts: this time he stood in bank vaults across the state, holding up stacks of money, to emphasize his call for the House to rein in spending. Sanford ended up vetoing the entire budget in June-rather than utilize his line-item veto power-and legislators were faced with the dilemma of either overriding the veto or shutting down state government. They chose to override.

It was this contentious relationship that led Time
magazine in November 2005 to name Sanford as one of the three worst governors in the nation, a stinging rebuke that listed as evidence Standard & Poor's 2005 lowering of South Carolina's bond rating, a 6.3% unemployment rate and the state's losing bid for a $500 million Airbus plant. Sanford dismissed the rating as the product of a liberal magazine; he pointed to National Review, a conservative publication, which had earlier described him as "one of the best new governors in the country," and to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, which has also given him high ratings for his fiscal record. While little was fair about the ranking-it was accompanied by less than 200 words of explanation-and the methodology was suspect, it provided fuel to his many critics on the eve of his 2006 reelection campaign, which he won.

His was not the kind of sweeping victory（全面胜利）
that draws notice outside a state's border, but Sanford's fiscal record was popular with some national conservatives and there was still mention of him as a possible presidential candidate in 2008. Sanford vigorously denied it and made no moves in that direction. But unlike 2000, when he supported John McCain, he did not issue an early presidential endorsement.

wildrose800331UID: 2602131

Times    罪犯类 社会类

Bernard L. Madoff

Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Latest Developments | Updated: June 29, 2009

·
A federal judge sentenced Bernard L. Madoff to 150 years in prison for operating a huge Ponzi scheme that devastated thousands of people, calling his crimes "extraordinarily evil." June 29, 2009

·
Regulators have accused four people of knowingly steering billions of dollars into Bernard L. Madoff's Ponzi scheme.June 23, 2009

·
Lawyers for Bernard L. Madoff's victims say that, by law, they should be given credit for the full value of the securities shown on the last account statements they received before Mr. Madoff's arrest in mid-December, even though they were bogus （假的） and none of the trades were ever made. June 8, 2009

·
Lawyer Irving H. Picard, trustee in the Bernard Madoff case, decides with his legal team who will be paid quickly, who will be paid eventually, who will not be paid at all and who will be asked to pay back money they got years ago. May 29, 2009

·
Two Caribbean hedge funds operated by Banco Santander, the Spanish financial giant, have agreed to return $235 million they withdrew from their accounts with Bernard L. Madoff in the months before his global Ponzi scheme collapsed. May 27, 2009

Updated: June 29, 2009

Overview

On Wall Street, his name was legendary. Now it is infamous. 过去和以前对比

With money Bernard L. Madoff had earned as a lifeguard on the beaches of Long Island, he built a trading powerhouse that had prospered for more than four decades. At age 70, he had become an influential spokesman for the traders who are the hidden gears of the marketplace.

But on Dec. 11, 2008, Mr. Madoff was arrested at his Manhattan home by federal agents and charged in what could be the largest fraud in Wall Street history, a Ponzi scheme whose cost over 20 years was initially put at $50 billion and later at $65 billion.

On March 12, 2009, Mr. Madoff pleaded答辩 guilty to all the federal charges filed against him -- 11 felony重罪 counts, including securities fraud证券诈骗, money laundering洗钱 and perjury伪证. And on June 29, he was sentenced by a federal judge to the maximum prison term: 150 years.

In pronouncing the sentence（宣布判刑）, Judge Denny Chin called the crimes “extraordinarily evil” and turned aside Mr. Madoff's protestations（抗议，主张） of regret earlier in the hearing听证.

“I’m responsible for a great deal of suffering and pain, I understand that,” the disgraced financier told the court. “I live in a tormented（agonized, painful, plagued）
state now, knowing all of the pain and suffering that I’ve created. I’ve left a legacy of shame, as some of my victims have pointed out, to my family and my grandchildren.”

Addressing his victims seated in the courtroom, he said: “I will turn and face you. I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t help you.”

In addition to the charges, the government sought at least $170 billion in forfeited (没收) assets from Mr. Madoff, a remarkable figure that apparently counts all the money that moved through Madoff bank accounts during the years of the fraud as the proceeds of illegal activities.

Mr. Madoff's lawyers have filed a letter with the court disputing that outsize figure, saying it represents all the money ever deposited in Madoff bank accounts over the years without distinguishing either legitimate business operations or the billions that were paid out to investors as part of the Ponzi scheme.

Mr. Madoff left a zigzagged（锯齿）
path of financial destruction across the world, from HSBC bank to BNP Paribas, to industry leaders and celebrities in the United States, from Elie Wiesel, the Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and the publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman. The Wilpon family, the owners of the Mets, were investors, as had been the family real estate business of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer.

R. Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet a prominent hedge fund（到底什么意思啊？） manager who apparently had lost $1.4 billion with Mr. Madoff, was found dead in his office on Madison Avenue on Dec. 22. The evidence pointed to suicide, the police said.

Mr. Madoff founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in 1960 and liked to tell interviewers about earning his initial stake by working as a lifeguard at city beaches and installing underground sprinkler systems（撒水系统）. By the early 1980s, his firm was one of the largest independent trading operations in the securities industry. The company had around $300 million in assets in 2000 at the height of the Internet bubble and ranked among the top trading and securities firms in the nation. According to the most recent federal filings, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities operated more than two dozen funds overseeing（= administrating, supervising） $17 billion.

These funds had been widely marketed to wealthy investors, hedge funds and other institutional customers for more than a decade, although an S.E.C. filing in the case said the firm reported having 11 to 23 clients at the beginning of 2008.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Madoff - whose investors prized his steady single-digit annual returns - actually had promised select clients extraordinarily high returns, as much as 46 percent, to lure them in. One of Mr. Madoff's more prominent investors, the Fairfield Sentry fund, reported having $7.3 billion in assets in October 2008 and claimed to have paid more than 11 percent interest each year through its 15-year track record. Angry victims began to charge that funds like Fairfield, which had built profitable businesses through providing access to Mr. Madoff's investment vehicle, had failed to perform proper due diligence.

To sustain his fraud, prosecutors said, Mr. Madoff assembled an ill-trained and inexperienced clerical staff, directed them to "generate false and fraudulent (fraud) documents," told lies and supplied false records to regulators, and shuffled(移来移去) hundreds of millions of dollars from bank to bank to create the illusion of active trading. The government said Mr. Madoff ordered multimillion-dollar bank transfers in part "to give the appearance that he was conducting securities transactions in Europe on behalf of the investors, when, in fact, he was not."

And, in an accusation that extends his crime's shadow to the edges of the business where his brother and sons worked, prosecutors accused Mr. Madoff of using some of the money he gathered through his Ponzi scheme to support the supposedly legitimate wholesale stock trading operation that made his name on Wall Street.

Specifically, prosecutors said that Mr. Madoff "caused more than $250 million" he collected through his Ponzi scheme from at least 2002 through 2008 "to be directed, through a series of wire transfers, to the operating accounts that funded the operations of these businesses."

The government also charged that he had money transferred from his firm's London office "to purchase property and services for the personal use and benefit" of himself, his family members and his associates.

Mr. Madoff ran the business with several family members, including his brother Peter, his nephew Charles, his niece Shana and his sons Mark and Andrew. None of his family members has been charged.

wildrose800331UID: 2602131

Times
名人类

Michael Joseph Jackson died at age 50 in Los Angeles on June 25, 2009. He spent a lifetime surprising people, in recent years largely because of a surreal(不现实的
怪异的) personal life, lurid（轰动
华丽的） legal scandals, serial plastic surgeries and erratic（strange） public behavior that have turned him -- on his very best days -- into the butt of late-night talk-show jokes and tabloid headlines. But when his career began to take off nearly four decades ago as a member of the pop group the Jackson 5, fans and entertainment industry veterans recognized something else about the pint-size(small-size, small-scale) musical dynamo(发电机) that was unusual: He was in possession of an outsize, mesmerizing（magnetizing, bewitching） talent.

The introduction to his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame entry seemed apt as a global audience followed reports of his hospitalization and then death:
"Michael Jackson is a singer, songwriter, dancer and celebrity icon with a vast catalog of hit records and countless awards to his credit. Beyond that, he has transfixed the world like few entertainers before or since. As a solo performer, he has enjoyed a level of superstardom previously known only to Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Frank Sinatra."

John Rockwell, the music critic of The Times, cited Mr. Jackson's musical and cultural influence in a 1982 review of the album "Thriller," calling it "a wonderful pop record, the latest statement by one of the great singers in popular music today." But it was more than that, he contended: "It is as hopeful a sign as we have had yet that the destructive barriers that spring up regularly between white and black music -- and between whites and blacks -- in this culture may be breached once again. Most important of all, it is another signpost on the road to Michael Jackson's own artistic fulfillment."

Mr. Jackson was born in Gary, Ind., on Aug. 29, 1958 and began performing professionally at age 5, joining his three older brothers in a group that their father, Joe, a steelworker, had organized the previous year. In 1968 the group, now five strong and known as the Jackson 5, was signed by Motown Records.

By 1969, Mr. Jackson had already spent years in talent shows and performing in seedy Midwestern clubs under the aegis (庇护
保护) of his dictatorial and ambitious father and Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records. They were the singer's twin mentors （instructors） during his early career.

Read More...

The Jackson 5 was an instant phenomenon. The group's first four singles - "I Want You Back," "ABC," "The Love You Save" and "I'll Be There" - all reached No. 1 on the pop charts in 1970, a feat no group had accomplished before. And young Michael was unquestionably the center of attention: he handled virtually all the lead vocals, danced with energy and finesse, and displayed a degree of showmanship rare in a performer of any age. The Jackson brothers were soon a fixture on television variety shows and even briefly had their own Saturday morning cartoon series.

Mr. Jackson had his own recollections of those years. "When you're a show-business child, you really don't have the maturity to understand a great deal of what is going on around you. People make a lot of decisions concerning your life when you're out of the room," he wrote in "Moon Walk," his 1988 autobiography. "Berry insisted on perfection and attention to detail. I'll never forget his persistence. This was his genius. Then and later, I observed every moment of the sessions where Berry was present and never forgot what I learned. To this day, I use the same principles."

In 1971 Mr. Jackson began recording under his own name, while also continuing to perform and record with his brothers. His recording of "Ben," the title song from a movie about a boy and his homicidal（murderous）
pet rat, was a No. 1 hit in 1972.

The brothers (minus Michael's older brother Jermaine, who was married to the daughter of Berry Gordy, Motown's founder and chief executive) left Motown in 1975 and, rechristened（重生，再度命名） the Jacksons, signed to Epic, a unit of CBS Records. The following year Michael made his movie debut as the Scarecrow in the screen version of the hit Broadway musical "The Wiz." But movie stardom proved not to be his destiny.

Music stardom on an unprecedented level, however, was. Mr. Jackson's first solo album for Epic, "Off the Wall," yielded four No..1 singles and sold seven million copies, but it was a mere prologue （前奏）
to what came next. His follow-up, "Thriller," released in 1982, became the best-selling album of all time and helped usher in the music video age. The video for the album's title track, directed by John Landis, was an elaborate horror-movie pastiche （模仿画，模仿剧）
that was more of a mini-movie than a promotional clip and played a crucial role in making MTV a household name.

Seven of the nine tracks on "Thriller" were released as singles and reached the Top 10. The album spent two years on the Billboard album chart and sold more than 50 million copies worldwide. It also won eight Grammy Awards.

Such accomplishments would have been difficult for anyone to equal, much less surpass. Mr. Jackson's next album, "Bad," released in 1987, sold eight million copies and produced five No..1 singles and another state-of-the-art video, this one directed by Martin Scorsese. It was a huge hit by almost anyone else's standards, but an inevitable letdown after "Thriller."

It was at this point that Mr. Jackson's bizarre private life began to overshadow（使失色） his music. He would go on to release several more albums and, from time to time, to stage elaborate concert tours. And he would never be too far from the public eye. But it would never again be his music that kept him there.

Sales of his recordings through Sony's music unit generated more than $300 million in royalties for Mr. Jackson since the early 1980s, according to three individuals with direct knowledge of the singer's business affairs. Revenues from concerts and music publishing -- including the creation of a venture with Sony that controls the Beatles catalog -- as well as from endorsements（支持？赞助？）, merchandising and music videos added, perhaps, $400 million more to that amount, these people believe. Subtracted (减去) were hefty costs （很多的成本）
like recording and production expenses, taxes and the like.

Those close to Mr. Jackson say that his finances had not deteriorated simply because he was a big spender. Until the early 1990s, they said, he paid relatively close attention to his accounting and kept an eye on the cash that flowed through his business and creative ventures. After that, they say, Mr. Jackson became overly enamored of (= obsessed with, fascinated with) something that ensnares (entrap) wealthy people of all stripes: bad advice.

Mr. Jackson's pre-expense share of the "Thriller" bounty -- including the album, singles and a popular video -- surpassed $125 million, according to a former adviser who requested anonymity because of the confidential nature of Mr. Jackson's finances. Those who counseled him in the "Thriller" era credit the pop star with financial acumen（insightfulness） and astute(sharp, shrewd) business judgment, evidenced by his $47.5 million purchase of the Beatles catalog in 1985 (a move that served to alienate him from Paul McCartney, the Beatles legend who imparted the financial wisdom of buying catalogs to Mr. Jackson during a casual chat, only to see Mr. Jackson then turn around and buy rights to many of Mr. McCartney's own songs). Acquaintances from that period say that he would occasionally borrow gas money, and he still lived in the Jackson family home in the suburban Encino section of Los Angeles.

It wasn't until the end of the 1980s that Mr. Jackson began to exhibit more baronial（男爵的，
绅士的=noble） tendencies. In 1988, he made his $17 million purchase of property near Santa Ynez, Calif., that became Neverland.

At the same time, Mr. Jackson was redefining the concept of spectacle in pop music. He hired Martin Scorsese, the film director, to direct a video for "Bad," a clip that one adviser with direct knowledge of the production budget said cost more than $1 million. The same adviser said that Mr. Jackson netted "way north" of $35 million from a yearlong "Bad" tour that began in 1987, and that heading into the 1990s Mr. Jackson was in sound shape financially.

By the mid-90s, though, Mr. Jackson's finances were under strain. He retreated from working regularly after the release of "Dangerous" in 1991 and settled a child-molestation（骚扰儿童） lawsuit for about $20 million. More significantly in terms of his finances, he had to sell Sony a 50 percent stake in the Beatles catalog in 1995 for more than $100 million, which one adviser said helped shore up（bolster， scaffold） the singer's wobbling accounts. Mr. Jackson wouldn't produce another studio album of completely new material until 2001.

In June 2005, he was acquitted（释放） today of all charges in connection with accusations that he molested（骚扰） a 13-year-old boy he had befriended as the youth was recovering from cancer in 2003. Mr. Jackson's complete acquittal ended a nearly four-month trial that featured 140 witnesses who painted clashing portraits of the 46-year-old international pop star as either pedophile（恋童癖者） or Peter Pan（天真的成年人
不长大的）.
Along with the verdict（判决）, the jury gave a note for the judge to read out in court. In it, they said they felt "the weight of the world's eyes upon us all" and that they had "thoroughly and meticulously（小心谨慎）" studied all the evidence. The note concluded with a plea "we would like the public to allow us to return to our lives as anonymously as we came."
The case arose from the February 2003 broadcast of "Living with Michael Jackson," a British documentary in which Mr. Jackson admitted sharing his bed with young boys, calling it a loving act unrelated to sex. The boy who later became the accuser was shown holding hands with the singer and resting his head affectionately on his shoulder. He was described as a 13-year-old cancer patient whom Mr. Jackson had decided to help.

On March 5, 2009, Mr. Jackson announced that he would perform a series of concerts in London in the summer, in what he called a "final curtain call." Mr. Jackson, 50, revealed the details of the concerts at a news conference in London, where he said he would perform 10 shows at that city's O2 Arena, beginning July 8. "When I say this is it, I mean this is it," Mr. Jackson said. "I'll be performing the songs my fans want to hear."

The shows would have been Mr. Jackson's first major performances since 2001 and 2002, when he appeared at a pair of 30th anniversary celebrations and two benefit concerts（
义演）; a brief appearance by Mr. Jackson at the World Music Awards in 2006 was booed（嘘声，起哄） by audience members.

Brian78UID: 2604416

好词
好句型
人物

Michael Jackson    很感动~

Jul 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

Michael Jackson, pop star, died on June 25th, aged 50

FIRST, the songs. The light, infectious（有感染力的） lilt（轻快的调子） of “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough”. The sheer（纯粹的）, vicious（不道德的） swoop of “Speed Demon”. The soft, syncopated（省略的） sadness of “Billie Jean”, or the raucous（沙哑的） shouts of “Bad”. His high, pure tenor(男高音) was shot through with the little yips（叫喊） and sighs he had learnt from Diana Ross. And behind it lay the astonishing confidence of child-star Michael in “I’ll Be There” or “Rockin’ Robin”, with each note treble-true and each time-change as natural as taking breath.

Next, the dancing, springing from（来自） the music like a bird out of a trap. Pointing, jerking（肌肉抽搐）, thrusting（猛推）, with rage（风行） in his feet, as Fred Astaire said once. He was at war with the floor as it slid away in the Moonwalk, and with the air as he spun（旋转） through it. He danced with his knees, on tiptoe, hunching his shoulders（耸肩） to his ears. His splayed（张开） hand pulled at his crotch（胯部） as if emasculation（阉割） would be sweet to him.

The show was everything. Lights made a giant（天才，巨人） of him as he stood motionless（静止的）: one white, glittering（闪闪发光的）, gloved（戴手套的） hand raised, fedora pulled down at a slant（倾斜）. Under the tight, too-short trousers, sequinned socks (“No one would recognise Bruce Springsteen by his socks”). On stage he felt truly alive, invincible（无敌的）, “unlimited”. He would appear in explosions of smoke and fire, or fly away like an astronaut. On his videos he was a leader of crowds, prowling（巡游） the city in “Thriller” (1983) in an outfit（装备） red as blood. P.T. Barnum was his model, crossed with Walt Disney. He wanted his life to be “the greatest show on earth”. And so, for much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was, with “Thriller” the biggest-selling album（签名纪念册） ever, eight Grammys in 1983, his dark, lavish（过于丰富的） videos a staple（主要成分） of the fledgling（初始的） MTV channel and his place as the King of Pop assured.

In Neverland

What lay behind it? He told his biographer, Randy Taraborrelli, that he had “deep, dark secrets”. They were encased（装入） in a voice as soft as a whisper, a handshake that felt like a cloud, a face as pale and delicate as plastic surgery and Porcelana skin-bleach（漂白皮肤） could make it. Dark glasses and surgical masks kept the world away from him. On his estate at Neverland in southern California, remote from the “normal people” who might grab and scratch him, he lived like a child with blank-eyed mannequins（模型）, pet snakes and Ferris wheels. He shared his meals with a chimpanzee and his bed with young boys, “the most loving thing to do”. People spread rumours about him, even twice accused him of sexual abuse, but he was never proved guilty of anything: except love, and desire for lost childhood, and a longing to be Peter Pan.

But that too was a show. Behind it was a man who could not bear to hear that Elvis still surpassed（超过） him, or that Madonna had won a Grammy when he hadn’t. He could force hard deals and millions of dollars out of Motown, CBS and Sony in face-to-face confrontations; he could fire his manager and his lawyer, after years of service, without a trace of sentiment, for letting down（让……失望） the brand; he could beat Paul McCartney to the Beatles’ back catalogue（目录） and exploit（使用） it ruthlessly（残忍地）, despite their friendship. He performed for 18 years with his four elder brothers in the Jackson 5, the bouncing（活泼的）, grinning（露齿而笑的） child from Gary, Indiana transforming into a global megastar（巨星）, then left them as brutally（残酷地） as he had always upstaged（自负的） them. But the family never left him. He blanked Joseph Jackson from his life and excised（切除） him from his face, but could not forget his father’s exhortation（劝告） to be “a winner, not a loser”. Perfectionism, like distrust, had been beaten into him.

What show business required, he had also learnt, was to give the fans what they wanted. If they demanded fantasies, he would provide them. (“The longer it takes them to discover [who I am], the more famous I will be.”) From the end of the 1980s he devised（发明） ever more headline-grabbing ventures: bidding for the bones of the Elephant Man, sleeping in an oxygen chamber, appearing in toyshops and galleries（画廊,戏院）in garish（炫耀的）
wigs（假发） and moustaches. Dates were arranged with Tatum O’Neal and Brooke Shields to prove he was all man, rather than the shrinking virgin（处子） of his other public self. Two marriages were undertaken, three children vicariously（代理地） produced.

Oddness（奇怪） overshadowed（使……失色） his real, hard-won achievements: world adulation（奉承） for a black pop star, the birth of video celebrity, and millions of dollars given to black causes. If the press stayed on his weird（怪异的） story, he believed, his records would sell. The risk was that the weirdness would multiply until he was hardly human.

His last public appearance, before his death of apparent cardiac arrest, was to announce a series of 50 sold-out concerts in London. Hours before his death he was rehearsing（彩排） for them, exuding（欢跃） joy, energy and sharp judgment. His glitter（闪闪发光） jackets, the tabloids claimed later, hid a body that was half-starved, subsisting on painkillers. Though he was worth $1.3 billion, said the Sun, he died with debts of $300m.

But he had sold 750m albums and, from Riga to Rio, children danced like him. In the words of his “Dirty Diana”,

That’s OK

Hey baby do what you want

I’ll be your night lovin’ thing

I’ll be the freak you can taunt

And I don’t care what you say

I want to go too far

I’ll be your everything

If you make me a star