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号外号外：跟阅读小分队一起看透逻辑链系列正式出炉~
详情请见：http://forum.chasedream.com/GMAT_CR/thread-580862-1-1.html
fox快点down QQ，加入Q群噢~~哈哈。
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Obama administration official: S& move 'a facts-be-damned decision'
A senior Obama administration official is calling Standard & Poor's move to downgrade U.S. credit "a facts-be-damned decision," saying the rating agency admitted to an error that inflated U.S. deficits by $2 trillion.
U.S. Treasury officials received S&'s analysis Friday afternoon and alerted the agency to the error, said the administration official, who was not authorized to speak for attribution.
The agency acknowledged the mistake, but said it was sticking with its decision to lower the U.S. rating from a top score of AAA to AA+.
"This is a facts-be-damned decision," the official said. "Their analysis was way off, but they wouldn't budge."
Other sources familiar with the S& matter called the move political and said the decision was rushed out too quickly.
The White House is now in wait-and-see mode -- hoping the decision and the S& analysis face outside scrutiny, the official said.
How will Congress react to downgrade? Walker on downgrade: 'I'm not surprised' U.S. loses top credit rating Velshi on S& downgrade impact
"A judgment flawed by a $2 trillion error speaks for itself," a Treasury Department spokesperson said.
John Chambers, head of sovereign ratings for S&, admitted there was an error in a CNN interview Friday night, saying "we agree with the Treasury's position on this and our figures reflect that."
But he also said the error "doesn't make a material difference -- it doesn't change the fact that your debt-to-GDP ratio ... will continue to rise over the next decade," he told "AC360."
In July, S& placed the United States' rating on "CreditWatch with negative implications" as the debt ceiling debate devolved into partisan bickering.
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To avoid a downgrade, S& said the United States needed to not only raise the debt ceiling, but also develop a "credible" plan to tackle the nation's long-term debt.
Chambers said the slowness at raising the debt ceiling and the political infighting led to the move. In announcing the downgrade, S& cited "political risks, rising debt burden; outlook negative."
"The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics," the agency said.
The immediate implication of the downgrade was unknown. "Only time's going to tell how we're going to be affected," former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker told CNN's Anderson Cooper. "Interest rates that affect the U.S. government ultimately can ripple throughout the economy, which is not good news given our weak economic condition already."
S& has not spelled out what the United States has to do to regain its AAA rating, sources said.
However, Chambers said "it's going to take a while to get back to AAA." Walker, who served as comptroller general from 1998 to 2008, said he wasn't "totally surprised" by the downgrade, saying S&P in April "made it very clear that they were looking for at least a $4 trillion reduction in the projected deficit over the next 10 years.
Within hours of S&P's move, both parties were playing the blame game. Former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who is among a field of Republican contenders for the 2012 presidential nomination, attributed the downgrade to a lack of leadership.
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"The markets are scared and the credit downgrade has happened because the president and this Congress continue to address the symptoms and not the disease," he said in a statement.
Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said the downgrade was due to "out-of-control spending and a lack of leadership in Washington"-- a sentiment echoed by several GOP lawmakers, including House Speaker John Boehner.
"The spending binge has resulted in job-destroying economic uncertainty and now threatens to send destructive ripple effects across our credit markets," Boehner said in a statement.
Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and also a GOP presidential contender, called the downgrade "a deeply troubling indicator of our country's decline under President Obama."
South Carolina GOP Sen. Jim DeMint, meanwhile, called on Obama to replace Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner immediately.
"The president should demand that Secretary Geithner resign and immediately replace him with someone who will help Washington focus on balancing our budget and allowing the private sector to create jobs," DeMint said in a statement.
Washington has a 'governability crisis' Breaking down the jobs report U.S. facing double dip recession? Debt ceiling deal & you On the Democrats' side, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stressed "the need for a balanced approach to deficit reduction that combines spending cuts with revenue-raising measures like closing taxpayer-funded giveaways to billionaires, oil companies and corporate jet owners."
A special joint committee of Congress will recommend further deficit reduction steps totaling $1.5 trillion or more, with Congress obligated to vote on the panel's proposals by the end of the year.
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"This makes the work of the joint committee all the more important, and shows why leaders should appoint members who will approach the committee's work with an open mind -- instead of hardliners who have already ruled out the balanced approach that the markets and rating agencies like S&P are demanding," Reid said.
Chambers, however, told CNN that "there's plenty of blame to go around," calling it "a problem that has been a long time in the making well over this administration and the prior administration."
It was a sentiment echoed by many, who took to social media sites Facebook and Twitter to communicate about the issue.
"Not really a surprise the credit rating was lowered. Both parties acted like children. Compromise is like using a water gun to put out fire," tweeted Michael Ross, who uses the Twitter handle MWRoss.
Rich Tucker, 36, of Charlotte, North Carolina, used humor to get his point across, tweeting that Standard and Poor's had also just downgraded the Beatles to the Monkeys.
"OK, done with the S&P downgrade jokes ... truly sucks that we are here ... we all need to sacrifice to get out of this hole," Tucker tweeted.
Later, Tucker told CNN that he believed "there is almost no one who isn't to blame for where we are." "We are all in this situation as a country together, and we are going to all have to sacrifice to get out of it," Tucker said.
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From CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/08/06/credit.rating.reaction.cnn/index.html?&hpt=hp_c1
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Remembering Folk Artist Bill Morrissey
Singer-songwriter Bill Morrissey, 59, died on July 23, but his death hasn't received the same attention as that of Amy Winehouse on the same day. Based in the northeastern state of New Hampshire, Morrissey was well known to folk music fans, releasing 10 studio albums and earning two Grammy nominations.
One of Bill Morrissey's Grammy nominations came for his 1999 album "Songs of Mississippi John Hurt."
Bill Morrissey became a professional musician at a young age. He grew up studying the great folk singers and songwriters of the 1960s. He also spent time working in restaurants and as a commercial fisherman, no doubt studying his co-workers as he went about his business, and later turning their quirks and behaviors into song. Songs about old mill towns and the people who populated them was a specialty of his. "Small Town On The River" is one example.
Morrissey's own life was as difficult as those of the characters in his songs. He battled alcoholism, depression, and was eventually diagnosed as bipolar. And, as he wrote on his website, "I'm on medication for depression, but sometimes the depression is stronger than the medication." He persevered, however, and, on good days, continued to write and perform.
Morrissey released "Something I Saw, or Thought I Saw" in 2001, featuring songs written soon after his second divorce. Many critics compared it to Richard and Linda Thompson's break-up album "Shoot Out The Lights," as both deal with fractured relationships. "Birches" is one of Bill Morrissey's best-loved songs. It about the middle of a marriage, telling the tale of a love that's still strong, but perhaps not burning as bright as it once did.
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自由阅读
Morrissey died while on tour, which is likely when most performers would prefer the inevitable to happen. In addition to his 10 solo CDs, Morrissey and his good friend Greg Brown released a Grammy-nominated duo CD. He also wrote a well-received novel called "Edson," and had just completed a second novel at the time of his death. If you'd like to find out more about Bill Morrissey, his songs and his books, visit his website: Bill Morrissey.net.
From VOA: http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Standard_English/Remembering-Bill-Morrissey-42614.html
【越障】
Lunar history
How do you solve a problem like maria?
An ancient collision may explain the moon’s Janus faces
EARTH’S moon has a split personality. One half of its surface—the half which, thanks to the vagaries of orbital mechanics, always faces Earth—is dominated by dark, smooth expanses of ancient, frozen lava known as maria (early astronomers, thinking they might be bodies of water, named them after the Latin word for “sea”). The contrast between the darkness of the maria and the brightness of the surrounding highlands forms a pattern popularly known, depending on the culture of the observer, as the man in the moon, the rabbit on the moon or one of many other optical illusions.
When astronomers got their first glimpses of the moon’s far side, however, they saw a strikingly different landscape. Early lunar probes revealed a surface that was mountainous, rugged, heavily cratered and virtually devoid of maria. To quote Bill Anders, one of the astronauts on Apollo 8 and thus one of the first three people to see the far side of the moon directly, it “looks like a sand pile my kids have been playing in...all beat up, no definition, just a lot of bumps and holes.”
Selenologists, as those who study the moon call themselves, have kicked around many theories to explain the differences between the moon’s two faces: Earth partly shielding the moon from meteoritic impacts; uneven heating from beneath; the collision that excavated a 2,500km-wide crater at the lunar south pole, one of the biggest in the solar system. None seems satisfactory. But in a paper just published in NatureMartin Jutzi and Erik Asphaug of the University of California, Santa Cruz, examine yet another idea. This is that the mountains of the lunar far side may be debris left over from an even bigger collision than the one at the south pole—a collision that left lumps on the lunar surface rather than digging holes in it.
Moonstruck
The most widely accepted theory of how the moon formed suggests it is the result of a cosmic smash-up between Earth and an object roughly the size of Mars that happened about 4.5 billion years ago during the solar system’s turbulent youth. This impact would have sprayed huge quantities of material into space, forming a ring around Earth similar to, but much thicker than, those that now adorn Saturn.
The moon is thought to have condensed rapidly from this ring. Computer simulation of the process suggests, however, that several smaller moons may have formed at the same time. Some would then have collided with Earth or the moon, while others would have been ejected from the system altogether. But one or more of them often end up, according to the simulations, in what are known as Trojan orbits, where they followed the proto-moon endlessly around Earth.
Or, rather, almost endlessly. For the hypothesis of Dr Jutzi and Dr Asphaug is that a large moonlet did eventually catch up and collide with the proto-moon—at a relatively low speed given that they shared an orbit—and produced the highlands on its far side as a result.
To test their theory, the two researchers simulated such a collision on a computer. They found that, assuming the second moon was indeed smaller than the main one, and was made of similar stuff (which, given that it is assumed to have formed from the same ring of debris, seems reasonable), then a comparatively low-speed collision at around 2.4 kilometres a second would mean that much more material from the moonlet was deposited on the lunar surface than was blasted off by the impact. Most of the excess rock, moreover, would have stayed near the point of impact, covering about half of the moon with a thicker, mountainous layer of crust—just what is seen on the real moon.
Of course, computer simulations can say only what could have happened, not what did. For that, physical evidence is required. Some suggestive evidence does exist, though. For a start, the crust on the far side of the moon is indeed much thicker than that on the nearside. Also, because the second moon would have been smaller than the main one, it would have cooled and solidified more quickly, meaning that its rocks would be older. Sure enough, different parts of the present moon’s crust, recovered by various missions to the lunar surface, differ in age by up to 200m years, a fact that has long puzzled selenologists but which the impact theory neatly explains. Moreover, such a huge collision on the far side would have shifted much of the magma ocean that then underlay the moon’s surface to the near side, which led to the formation of the maria.
More evidence may surface when the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission, an American spacecraft designed to map the moon’s gravitational field, arrives in lunar orbit in around six months’ time. That should yield a detailed map of the lunar crust, and how its thickness varies from place to place. But the best way to check the new hypothesis would be for selenologists to get their hands on rocks from the far side.
Sadly, that is unlikely to happen soon. Neither America nor Russia has any sample-recovery missions planned for the moon. China does (scheduled for 2017). But, like the American and Soviet missions of the 1960s and 1970s, the Chinese are expected to opt for the safety of a landing on the near side. Selenologists may therefore have to wait a long time before they can test the Jutzi-Asphaug model properly.
--From The Economist
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发表于 2011-8-6 23:06:03
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发表于 2011-8-7 14:30:33
