【每日阅读训练第三期——速度越障1系列】【1-12】经管

Periwinkle

速度：
DNA Tests Prove Worms in Sardine Cans are Kosher

Some 21st century technology has come to the aid of 2000-year-old religious dietary laws. Orthodox Jewish rabbis in New York recently called in DNA experts to help them answer an unusual question: are worms found in a sardine can kosher?

Let's say one day you're opening up a can of sardines and you come across a worm. It is not as unusual as you might think.

"Unfortunately, recently, it hasn't been unusual at all," noted Rabbi Chaim Loike with the Orthodox Union, an organization that certifies whether products conform to Jewish dietary law.

Loikea says these worms were showing up in about one out of every six cans. He does not know why they have become so common, but he says it is not necessarily a new phenomenon.

"The Talmud, which was written 2,000 years ago, described a number of worms, which, even though they're not something you would want to eat, if they were accidentally consumed, would be kosher," Loikea explained.

The Talmud, a compilation of rabbinic opinions, debates and analyses, lays out the framework for Jewish law. It says if the worm comes from the intestines, it is generally not kosher.

"However, if a worm is found to have grown its entire life in the flesh of the fish, it is considered to be the same as the fish," said Loikea. "And therefore, it's kosher." Intestinal worms might show up if the sardines are not handled properly.

But why would it matter if the worm is kosher? Most people would still find it disgusting.

Well, if the rabbis decide that these worms, which have become so common in sardines, are not kosher, the Orthodox Union would no longer give the fish its seal of approval. That's a big deal, because even many non-Jews look for that certification as a sign of quality. Kosher foods are a $12.5 billion market.

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"We're not advocating that people should eat worms. We're just researching whether or not we would have to de-certify all these things," Loikea added.

But Loike is a rabbi, not a parasitologist. He can't tell a gut worm from a flesh worm. So he went where anyone would go to find an expert: the Internet search engine, Google.

"And we saw all the names of people who published papers on them and we started cold-calling them," said Loike.

Mark Siddall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York is one of the world's top experts on parasites. Siddall invited Loike to his office. The rabbi came with some cans of sardines, some tubs of fish eggs.

"[He also brought] a bag of previously frozen whole sardines, as well, that were dripping on the floor as we were walking to the elevators," recalled Siddall.

Dripping bags of fish aside, parasites do not disgust Siddall. He says they are all around us.

"We say, 'yuck' because we in Western society are kind-of like, 'Oh, parasites, that's horrible, right?' But it's actually quite normal for things to be parasitized," Siddall noted.

To figure out what kind of parasites Loike's fish had, Siddall used a technique called DNA barcoding. The genetic code of certain genes varies enough between species that researchers can use them to tell one from another.

Siddall and his colleagues have used it to help the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service check for endangered species in smuggled goods.

"There was a shipment of leeches that came in that were labeled as advertising material. And they were confiscated," Siddall said.

DNA barcoding identified them as endangered European medicinal leeches. Siddall had busted a leech-smuggling ring.

When he DNA-barcoded Loike's sardine worms, he found five species.

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"And in all cases they were species we would normally expect [to find] in the muscle tissue or the ovarian tissue of the fish, and thus there was no indication whatsoever that there was improper handling," Siddall explained.

So the Orthodox Union issued a decision: the sardines remain kosher.

Siddall says it's the first time DNA barcoding has been used for a strictly cultural issue.

"And that's kind of cool, where you get cross-talk between science and culture," Siddall added.

As for Rabbi Loike, it strikes him that the parasites found in the fish are the same ones described in the Talmud.
"The fish haven't really changed much in 2,000 years. They have the same parasites, the same everything. The world just keeps going and nothing's really changed," Loike noted.

"The fish haven't really changed much in 2,000 years. They have the same parasites, the same everything. The world just keeps going and nothing's really changed," Loike noted.

We just use different tools to describe it.

Lost Luggage Ends Up Here

Millions of Americans return from long-distance trips by air, but their luggage doesn't always come home with them.

Airline identification tags can come loose, and the bags go who-knows-where.

Amazingly, some people never pick up their luggage at airport baggage-claim carousels.

And passengers leave all kinds of things on planes.

The airlines collect the items and, for 90 days, attempt to find their owners. If they have no luck, they are literally left holding the bags of thousands of travelers.

They don't keep them, since they're not in the warehouse business. And by law, they cannot sell the bags, because the airlines might be tempted to deliberately misplace luggage.

So once insurance companies have paid for lost bags and their contents, and they no longer belong to passengers, a unique store in the little town of Scottsboro, Alabama, buys them - sight unseen.

The "Unclaimed Baggage Center," is so popular that the building, which is set up like a department store, is the number-one tourist attraction in all of Alabama.

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More than one million visitors stop in each year and take one of the store's squeaky shopping carts on a hunt for treasures.

The Unclaimed Baggage Center displays one-of-a-kind items lost by individual travelers, plus whole racks of identical items found in freight shipments that for some reason never got delivered.

Each day, clerks bring out 7,000 new items, and veteran shoppers rush to paw over them. You can find everything from precious jewels to hockey sticks, best-selling novels, leather jackets, tape recorders, surfboards, even half-used tubes of toothpaste.

That's right - used toothpaste for 50 cents or a dollar.

The store's own laundry washes or dry cleans all the clothes found in luggage, then sells them. Need a wedding dress? There's a selection of beautiful lost and unclaimed ones.

The Unclaimed Baggage Center has found guns, illegal drugs - even a live rattlesnake - inside bags.

The store has a little museum where some of its most unusual acquisitions have been preserved. They include highland bagpipes, a burial mask from an Egyptian pharaoh's tomb, and a medieval suit of armor.

Less than one-half of one percent of luggage checked on U.S. carriers is permanently lost and available to the store. Still, that's a lot of toothpaste and wedding dresses that never made it home.

Russians Vote for President

Russians are choosing a president for the fifth time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, 20 years ago. Opinion polls indicate Vladimir Putin is considered the leading candidate for a job that could keep him in the Kremlin through 2018.

In voting from the Pacific to the Baltic, turnout appears strong. Three months ago, Russia's parliamentary elections were clouded by charges of widespread fraud. To combat fraud this time, more than 200,000 people are volunteering as poll watchers, and one million more are registered to watch the voting on web cameras installed in all of Russia's polling places.

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At a Moscow school, Alexander Pavlovsky, a 37-year-old advertising account manager, explains why he has volunteered:

Planning to stay with the vote count through the night, he says he wants Russia's next generation to only know clean and democratic elections.

Photo Gallery

Judging by the steady flow of voters, many in fur coats and hats, it appears that, after a winter of controversy over the parliamentary elections, turnout for the presidential contest is strong.

Maria Tarasova, a history teacher at the school, presides over the local voting committee. She says three months of national furor over fraud accusations brought two changes to her local voting station.

She says there are more citizen observers and there are two web cameras. Anyone with an Internet connection can watch the voting process live.

About one-half of Russian adults now use the Internet, a new factor in this election.

Vitaly Chobanu, an Internet user and first time voter, said he was voting for the new face in the five-candidate presidential race - Mikhail Prokhorov.

He says he likes Prokhorov's pro-business, pro-democracy stance.

Support for Prokhorov also came from Olga Mikhailova. Dressed in a fur coat, she runs a small business that sells fur coats.

She says she liked Putin, but says running a small business has become increasingly difficult. She says she hopes that Prokhorov, a businessman, "will change something because it feels like we're being strangled."

But two middle aged men coming quickly out of the polling station said they voted for Putin, who served two terms as president before becoming prime minister.

Why? Asks one. For stability.

Lyudmila Elbakri, a retired economist, lingers to talk.

She says she lived through the stagnation years of the 1970s under long ruling Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

She says she voted for Prokhorov. At age 75, she said Russia should not stop, it needs changes.

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自由阅读：If Putin wins today's vote, he will begin a six-year term in May. After that, he would be eligible to run for a second six-year term, a move that would put him at the top of Russian politics for a quarter-century.






越障：

The All-American Contest At The World Bank




The race for the World Bank presidency is producing unusual jockeying among U.S. lawmakers and foreign nations. It’s not a battle to break the U.S. government’s lock on the top job. Instead, the contest so far appears to be entirely about choosing the right U.S. citizen to represent the interests of 187 member nations.


With two weeks to go before the nominations period closes, only one person is openly campaigning for the job: economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. No other candidate has stepped forward, American or not. The Obama administration plans to nominate an American before the window closes on March 23. And some developing countries have quietly discussed pursuing Stanley Fischer, the highly regarded Israeli central banker who is also an American, but it’s still only talk.


Fischer is not on the White House’s radar right now, and Sachs will not be the Obama administration’s nominee. The White House’s list, which started out with a couple dozen names, has been whittled down to a half dozen people with experience in U.S. policy or business (or both), according to a person familiar with the matter. The decision is in the hands of President Barack Obama but he has yet to make a final choice.


Sachs, if nothing else, has been successful at shattering the customs of a typical World Bank race. He audaciously announced his candidacy in an op-ed last week and has been tallying glowing endorsements from finance ministers and heads of state on his website. (The list of nations backing him so far includes Kenya, Malaysia, Jordan, Namibia and East Timor.)


Sachs even has U.S. lawmakers lobbying for him. A senior House Democrat, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, is circulating a letter on Capitol Hill — addressed to President Obama — outlining the merits of a Sachs candidacy and collecting signatures. Sachs has taken to Twitter to respond to critics individually, and to criticize the selection process. The U.S. government, he said, probably wants a Washington insider as bank president “to push narrow U.S. interests.” (Sachs has plenty of critics, and they came out early, so he’ll be busy in the coming weeks.)


Fischer, who is not a candidate, would probably be among the least controversial picks among people inside the World Bank. He is widely respected around the world for his academic credentials and his policy experience. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for decades (where he was Ben Bernanke’s thesis adviser), served as chief economist at the World Bank and in the No. 2 post at the International Monetary Fund – a position traditionally held by an American – in the 1990s. He later worked at Citigroup and became governor of the Bank of Israel in 2005.


Fischer made a late, dark-horse bid for the IMF’s top job last year, even drawing an endorsement from the Palestinian prime minister. He was quickly disqualified because he was 67 at the time, two years older than IMF rules permitted for a first-time managing director, but he also was seen as unlikely precisely because of his American citizenship. The World Bank, however, does not have such an age requirement for its presidency. That has stoked some speculation among developing countries that he could be a consensus candidate who would still be an American. (Fischer was born in Northern Rhodesia — now Zambia — and is a citizen of both Israel and the United States. In a spoof April Fools-style story Thursday, apparently to commemorate Purim, the Jerusalem Post joked that Fischer would step down from his current post to become Zambia’s central banker.)


Fischer, however, does not appear willing to dive into a campaign again, despite encouragement from developing nations. He recently told the Journal he was “not looking at” the World Bank job.


The White House’s list includes names we’ve heard for weeks. Lawrence Summers – who has done stints as World Bank chief economist, U.S. Treasury secretary, Harvard president and director of the White House National Economic Council — is well known both for his economic credentials and his not-always-diplomatic style.


Susan Rice, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, is widely regarded for her diplomatic skills and foreign policy expertise — she’s often mentioned as a future U.S. Secretary of State — but her thinner economic or business credentials could create some unease among World Bank shareholders. (That won’t necessarily be a disqualifying factor, as the World Bank isn’t exactly hurting for other people with economic credentials. And Rice focused on many of the issues the World Bank president faces – weak states and global poverty – during her work with the U.N. and at the Brookings Institution. But it’s still a hurdle.)


Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is frequently mentioned as a strong potential candidate for the job, but he’s not interested. Same goes for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who recently defended the value of having an American as bank president and the importance of the bank for U.S. businesses.


Since World Bank President Robert Zoellick confirmed his departure three weeks ago, no serious people have doubted that the U.S. would maintain its hold on the job – even if they wished for a truly merit-based process that cast aside nationality. Created after World War II, the World Bank has always had an American as president while a European has led the IMF. The combined shares of U.S. and European nations in each organization make it nearly impossible for a candidate from another background to break the unwritten, informal agreement.


While the nationality of the winner is widely assumed, the quieter U.S. approach has won some goodwill. Europeans began pushing for Christine Lagarde, previously France’s finance minister, to become the new IMF chief even before the nominations process got underway last May. That helped ensure her success against bids from Fischer and Mexican central banker Agustin Carstens, but also generated some resentment from developing nations.


“Americans have been much more cautious in their remarks,” says Lawrence MacDonald of the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank that favors a more competitive selection process. “These are nuances. It’s not the kind of reform many had wished for.”

thouzand_

越障练习：第一遍:05'11 第二遍：07'21.
文章回忆：
Focus: who is more realistic candidate for the president of World Bank.
1) comparison between JS and F (both are americans).
-JS:favoured by the White house and suppoted by the lawmaker lobbyist,
-F: advantageous in academic and IMF qualification, but not keen on this position.
2) other candidates on the WH's list are less promising.
-less qualified than JS or F
3) American is probably nominated to the head of World Bank,
    but they are very cautious and "quieter" this time.
-IMF for European and new head is not favored by developing countries.
感想：上来第一遍的时候，头脑一片空白。。这篇当中还是有很多形象的论调和譬喻，希望回头能够一一掌握和学习。

猫咪团团

1:47
1:41
1:42
1:55
2:13

8:08

Threesu

0‘59
0’50
0‘58
0’56
0‘50

lileeli

1‘47
1’40
1‘54
2’09
1‘50
6’17

一加heidy

1‘19   1’28  1‘42  1’36   1‘34
越障6分钟，讲的是世界银行主席选举的事
S要竞选主席，还参加了访谈什么的，奥巴马有竞选选举的名单，但他还没决定选谁
F也很适合当主席，可是他没有兴趣，而且年龄超过了要求
接下来还有几个人也可以做候选人，其中讲到了个女的，她竞选的不足
说到都是美国人获得这一职位，和IMF做了下对比
最后说的忘了。。。。。人名好多啊，都混了

xunjiejie5

2‘45
1’59
1‘46
1’47
1'37
越障
越障难啊，看得我晕乎乎的
讲的是世界银行选举的事情，唉。。。。。。。。。。。

风鸣蝉

1'52（不知道说的什么，大概是讨论沙丁鱼里吃出虫真的大丈夫？）
2'08
1'54
2'07
2'16

778879

1‘38
1’28
1‘39
1’37
1‘25
世界银行主席的席位仍未确定。
S主动竞选，大家希望F能当选。但奥巴马自己有一份名单，最终人选将从中选出。而S、F都不在这份名单上
介绍S的背景，他打破了传统，成为首个主动竞选主席的人。他甚至还有一个特牛X的人的推荐
介绍F，F在MIT任教，曾在IMF做过，总之很有希望，但他本人不太愿意当主席，他表示自己不愿意蹚这浑水
接着介绍了几个名单上的人
最后说默认的规则是世界银行主席是美国人，IMF主席是欧洲人。基本可以确定的是世界银行主席人选基本还是美国人

babybearmm

占个位置，该填补作业