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【速度】
The Raymond Davis case
Blood for money for blood
【计时1】
CAN monetary compensation buy justice? The trail of “blood money” paid in Pakistan last year, to wash away the killings carried out by CIA agent Raymond Davis, would suggest that only more misery follows. This week, the widow of one of Mr Davis’s victims was killed at home, allegedly by her own father, who also murdered his wife.
In January 2011 Mr Davis, working under cover for the CIA, had gunned down two men who were riding a motorbike on a busy road in the middle of Lahore, the country’s second-biggest city. The event threw America’s relations with Pakistan into a tailspin from which they have never recovered. The killing of Osama bin Laden, a year ago, overshadowed the Davis case in the foreign press, but it was not forgotten among ordinary Pakistanis.
Apparently Mr Davis had thought the two men, who were reportedly armed, were about to attack him. A former soldier with America’s special forces, who was secretly tasked to the security detail for a group of CIA agents tracking a Pakistani jihadi group, Mr Davis was seen to shoot the first of two the men through his own car’s windscreen. He turned his Glock pistol to the other man and shot him in the back as he was trying to flee.
It remains unclear to this day whether the men, Faizan Haider and Mohammad Faheem, were simple street robbers, or Pakistani intelligence agents or members of an extremist group. Nor is it apparent whether Mr Davis was a trigger-happy Rambo, or if the two men posed a genuine threat to his life. (A third man, a bystander, was killed when a speeding U.S. diplomatic vehicle coming to the aid of Mr Davis ran him down. His family seem to have got no compensation at all.)
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A month after the incident Mr Faheem’s widow, Shumaila, poisoned herself. In hospital before she died, she said “I do not expect any justice from this government.” What she wanted was “blood for blood…The way my husband was shot, his killer should be shot in the same fashion”.
In the event Mr Davis was jailed by the Pakistani authorities. There followed a furious row between officials in Islamabad and Washington, where his superiors insisted that their man had diplomatic immunity. Public opinion in Pakistan was outraged, with mullahs and other nationalist rabble-rousers coming out on to the streets. Imran Khan, a cricketer-turned-politician, threatened that he would lead great masses out to protest if Mr Davis were let go.
Amid the hysteria, a deal was stitched together covertly in March 2011. Suddenly Mr Davis was free of the double-murder charge and on an aeroplane headed home. The families of Messrs Haider and Faheem were handed 200m rupees (US$2.2m) under an Islamic provision in the law which allows for “blood money” to be paid in lieu of punishment for a crime. In official terms the Americans denied paying the money, but no one believed a word of it.
That Mr Davis’s freedom was bought using Islamic law left the fire-breathing mullahs and their supporters with no argument against his release. Caught short, hardly any of their followers turned out on the streets.
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With their share of the money, Faizan Haider’s in-laws, who were of very modest means, moved into a big house in one of Lahore’s nicer neighbourhoods. But trouble followed for the newly rich family. It seems that Mr Haider’s widow, Zohra, wanted to get remarried. Her groom was to have been her cousin—the son of her mother’s sister. Her mother, Nabeela, had encouraged the match. But her father, Shahzad Butt, wouldn’t hear of it, reportedly because he did not want more claimants to the family’s share of the loot.
This week, witnesses say, Mr Butt shot his wife Nabeela inside the new family compound and then chased his daughter down the street, killing her in turn. Now he’s on the run.
Meanwhile, over in the United States, 37-year-old Mr Davis is still attracting attention. As if to inspire Schadenfreude in Pakistan, soon after Mr Davis got back to the United States he ended up in an ugly brawl. The punch-up seems to have been over a parking spot outside a bagel shop in a Denver suburb, where he allegedly beat up another hungry driver. This week, Mr Davis pleaded not guilty to assault charges. He faces a trial in September; if convicted, he could face a mandatory sentence of five years in prison.
Pakistanis will be hoping the bagel incident can bring down some punishment on Mr Davis, even when a double-homicide didn’t.
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How to make bird flu fly, part one
The first of two controversial research papers is published
ON APRIL 27th, after much toing and froing, the Dutch government gave Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam permission to submit his paper on bird flu to Science. Dr Fouchier is the head of one of two groups studying how bird flu might become transmissible between people. In December the authorities in America and the Netherlands prevented both his group and the other, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from publishing their findings, lest they get into the wrong hands. This official fear stemmed from the deadly nature of bird flu. Of the 602 human cases reported since 2003, 355 have been fatal. The factor that has stopped the death toll being worse is that people have to catch the virus directly from a bird (usually a chicken). It rarely, if ever, passes from one person to another.
Science has yet to publish Dr Fouchier’s manuscript, but its rival Nature has gone ahead and published Dr Kawaoka’s. This paper got clearance from the American authorities on April 20th. So it is now possible to see what all the fuss was about.
Dr Kawaoka was interested in the role a protein called haemagglutinin (HA) plays in the transmission of avian influenza. HA is the viral equivalent of a grappling hook: it lets the virus latch onto a cell by binding to substances called sialic acids that are found in receptors on the cell’s surface. This done, the virus infects the cell with its DNA. But because the sialic acid found in birds is chemically different from that in mammals, and because bird flu has evolved to recognise only the avian variety, it cannot stick easily to mammalian cells, limiting its ability to infect people.
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【计时5】
The researchers wanted to know what it would take to enhance that ability. They took the HA gene from avian influenza viruses found in Vietnam and made millions of mutant versions, each of which was spliced back into a copy of the original virus. They then screened 2.1m of these mutant viruses to see which bind to sialic acid of the mammalian variety. Just eight can do so, and just one of those has become, in effect, a mammalian specialist, because it can no longer bind to avian cells.
Dr Kawaoka decided to concentrate his efforts on this specialist. Further tests revealed that two mutations in its HA gene, called N224K and Q226L, were responsible for its characteristics.
It is here that things get complicated. Instead of looking at the doubly mutated gene in bird flu, the team transplanted it into the virus that caused the human-flu pandemic of 2009. By doing so, they virtually guaranteed they would make a virus that could pass between mammals.
And so it proved. When they tested it on ferrets (often used as proxies for people in these sorts of studies), it passed through the air from one animal to another. Moreover, closer inspection showed that two other mutations, N158D and T318I, had spontaneously got tangled up in the mix.
What all this means, then, is slightly obscure. Dr Kawaoka’s purpose was to study how the mammalian-transmission mutations worked. In this, he succeeded. He found that N224K, Q226L and N158D all control areas in the head of the HA protein—ie, the hook—and probably help it attach to the mammalian flavour of sialic acid. T318I controls part of HA’s stem and may help to stabilise the protein as it injects viral DNA into cells.
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【自由阅读】
By transferring the genes into a virus that was known to be good at moving between mammals, Dr Kawaoka has shown that the HA gene is not itself an obstacle to bird flu gaining that ability, though its other genes may be. Perhaps Dr Fouchier’s paper will shed more light on the matter.
【53】
【越障】
4 Ways the Euro Could Fail
All courses of action appear to lead to an eventual financial crisis of some sort. But moderate progrowth policies are the best bet to minimize the damage
The euro will not die overnight, but it seems increasingly unlikely that the common currency will survive in its present form. European countries and international financial institutions insist that they still expect the euro zone to remain intact, but they are already preparing contingency plans for some sort of breakup. The European Investment Bank, for example, recently required Greek borrowers to agree to a mechanism for repaying loans if Greece abandons the euro.
No one knows, of course, precisely when a fatal euro-zone crisis will occur or exactly what might trigger it. And although the ultimate failure of the euro would cause immense economic and financial shocks worldwide, in the short run the U.S. economy might actually benefit. International investors are already pulling their money out of the most troubled European countries and moving it to safer havens. If the euro zone itself breaks up, lots of that hot money could pour into U.S. markets. Over the longer term, though, the specific impact will depend on how the euro zone unravels. Basically, there are four scenarios, listed here from most to least likely in the short run:
France and other countries persuade Germany to agree to progrowth policies.
Germany has consistently been the strongest advocate of restructuring and austerity as the key to solving Europe’s financial problems. But one by one, Germany’s economic allies are running into political resistance to those policies. The collapse of the Dutch government has made it difficult for that country to meet its budget targets. And in France, Socialist François Hollande is very likely to win Sunday’s presidential election. He has been calling for more progrowth policies, which has provoked consternation in Germany. But the balance in Europe has shifted, and Germany may have no choice but to go along with more spending — and more borrowing — by national governments. In the short run, that would help Europe’s economies by reducing unemployment and limiting the severity of any recessions. But additional borrowing will also contribute to the debt load that governments have to carry.
Outlook: Some progrowth policies will likely be adopted, but they would only postpone, rather than solve, the euro-zone crisis. To the extent that stimulus results in additional debt, any eventual financial crisis might be worse.
Austerity policies force most of Europe into recession.
Germany may pay lip service to the importance of economic growth but continue to promote austerity. Trouble is, a dozen European countries are now in an economic downturn, including Spain, which officially went into recession earlier this week. In the long run, financially troubled countries need to trim their spending, raise taxes, bring down their labor costs and limit their borrowing. But cutting so fast that a country goes into recession can actually make it harder to reduce debt as a percentage of GDP — because the GDP is shrinking. If Germany prevails and limits growth policies to a little window dressing, financially weak countries may eventually become unable to sell new bonds at interest rates they can afford or voters may refuse to keep supporting austerity policies.
Outlook: A greater likelihood of a widespread recession that spreads to the U.S. and heightened risks of government-bond defaults. This could be the most disruptive scenario, combining economic slowdowns with big shocks to the international banking system.
The weakest countries get pushed out of the euro zone one by one.
If everything continues on present course, then the weakest euro-zone countries will have to offer higher and higher interest rates to sell their bonds, and eventually they will no longer be able to afford to stay in the euro. Greece would probably go first, which would fuel speculation about Portugal, Spain and even Italy. In turn, that would likely push interest rates even higher for those countries, creating a vicious circle.
Outlook: Less likely in the short run, but hard to avoid eventually if nothing changes fundamentally. How painful would it be? On the minus side, countries leaving the euro zone one by one would cause a series of shocks to major banks that hold their debt. On the plus side, after countries left, they would be able to set their economies on a course for recovery. Argentina, which had tied its currency to the dollar in the early 1990s, suffered a major recession after it devalued its currency in 2001. But by 2003, its economy was booming again.
The euro zone splits into two separate currency areas.
The most rational solution — but the least likely for political reasons — would be for Germany and a few allies, such as the Netherlands, to leave the euro zone and create their own new currency. The euro would remain the currency of the southern European countries and could be devalued, easing the pressure on them.
Outlook: A recession in southern Europe for a year or so. Banks would still suffer losses on their bonds — but from price declines rather than outright defaults. Theoretically, at least, this would be the best solution and the least disruptive.
There may, in fact, be no ideal solution. In all four scenarios, there is major financial disruption ahead. They differ only in the severity of the eventual crisis and its timing. The worst policies are the most extreme ones: doing nothing, or being purely harsh and punitive. The best would be to try to maintain some measure of economic growth while preventing countries that are already overindebted from adding too much to their borrowing. The most realistic goal at this point may simply be to avoid making matters worse and to try to minimize the damage.
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发表于 2012-5-3 21:21:26
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，然后就是bird flu。小白这期速度堪称恐怖特辑
