【每日阅读训练——速度越障6系列】【6-3】

daisyの小夢想

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Ted Turner's Plans To Save The World


At age 72 Ted Turner isn’t quite as pugnacious as he once was. He no longer refers to pro-lifers as “bozos.” It’s been years since he challenged onetime media rival Rupert Murdoch to a fistfight. And while he is a true believer in climate change, he’s abandoned his prediction of a planet where most of the population will die off, leaving only a few cannibals to roam the scorched Earth.


There are still flashes of the old Mouth of the South—as when he gets excited about one of his causes. “I like the elephants and the gorillas and everything, too,” he says during a recent sit-down. “But I have to say, if I had to pick one species, I’d pick women.” (He has been married and divorced three times.) Still, he has become a champion of women’s rights in the developing world. “The worst thing that’s perpetrated on women is female genital mutilation,” he says. “They’re not taking their knives out and cutting the wackers off little boys. … You cut the clitoris off so you can’t enjoy sex, and it’s really painful. I’ve never had it happen to me, but I’m just going by what I’ve read.”
Yes, Turner has mellowed—somewhat. “Once I was let go from Time Warner,” he says, “I decided … I’m dedicating most of my time to trying to save the world.” And much of his remaining $2 billion fortune, too. Captain Outrageous has morphed into Captain Planet, who wants to protect endangered species, end poverty, embrace population control, achieve nuclear disarmament. He has drawn closer to his five children, all of them board members of the Turner Foundation and each continuing his own interests in nature and the media. There is a discernible spouselike ease between him and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Dewberry, a novelist who is 25 years his junior. “I’m still working on [my legacy],” says Turner. “I haven’t finished yet.”
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He is proud of small accomplishments. “Is that beautiful or not?” Turner asks, pointing out the window of his office in the Turner Building toward a street-level lot covered in dozens of solar panels in downtown Atlanta. “Parking lots are wastelands because they’re black and they absorb the heat rather than reflect. I’m gonna start a movement to paint parking lots white instead of black.”
What he doesn’t point out is the landmark five blocks away: the CNN Center, Turner’s greatest accomplishment. Today, amid the gleaming glass and the images of Headline News, Anderson Cooper and Piers Morgan beamed across giant screens, it’s hard to fathom the impact the 24-hour cable news channel once had when it launched back in 1980. There was nothing like it then, and news was breaking out all over the world: the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran; a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt; boycotted Olympics Games thanks to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the start of the Iran-Iraq war; the Mariel boat lift from Cuba; Lech Walesa’s first strike in Poland’s Gdansk shipyards; an epic presidential election that swept Ronald Reagan into office. You could read about these events in Time or Newsweek or the New York Times, but CNN let you watch them, again and again, throughout the day.
With CNN, Turner—the crazy skipper of the Courageous who had successfully defended the America’s Cup; the mercurial owner of the hapless Atlanta Braves who was inspired to hire, fire and rehire Bobby Cox as manager—had suddenly achieved the stature of a global ambassador. “I went around the world making friends, because that’s the best thing to do with your customers,” Turner recalls. “And I’m talking about Communist China, Russia, which was the Soviet Union at the time.”
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The 1996 merger of Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner marked the pinnacle of CNN—and the start of Ted Turner’s decline. That year Murdoch kicked off Fox News Channel, which today crushes CNN in the ratings. Turner clashed with Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin, got bucked down from head of cable networks to vice chairman, and left the board in 2006. Meantime, his stake in Time Warner, worth $9.1 billion in 2000, shrank by nearly 80%, by dint of the disastrous marriage with America Online. “You can get by on $2 billion,” Turner laughs.
He lost a lot more than money. “[After] they took Ted’s job from him, the company changed a lot and lost that culture of doing for others,” says Laura Turner Seydel, Turner’s oldest daughter, an environmentalist. “They killed the Goodwill Games, which was never a moneymaker, and all the documentaries they were making.” While Turner can put up some of the old bluster, it is tinged with the wistfulness of a retired prizefighter. His office is a museum of bygone glory, with its Emmy awards and photos of past leaders: Turner with Castro, with Jacques Cousteau, with former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, with Mikhail Gorbachev, with Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. “Here’s one with President Obama,” Turner says, perking up. “When I met him I said, ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time.’ He said, ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time.’”
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These days Turner is still pretty well connected but packs a lot less throw weight. When it comes to nuclear disarmament, he relies on “jawboning, going around and writing editorials.” To plug the cause he teamed up with Sam Nunn, the onetime Democratic senator from Georgia whose Nunn-Lugar Threat Reduction program has helped deactivate 6,000 nuclear warheads in Russia and former Soviet republics. “You did a film, Last Best Chance,” Dew¬berry reminds him, a 2005 thriller about terrorists trying to get their hands on loose nukes. Turner has also teamed up with T. Boone Pickens to promote alternative energy. “He and I have done some panels together, primarily talking about getting natural gas implemented as a bridge fuel to solar and wind.”
Turner’s to-do list takes the form of “11 Voluntary Initiatives,” a summary of his pet causes (starting with “I promise to care for planet Earth … ”). He keeps a copy in his wallet—minitablets that bear a deliberate, if slightly hubristic, resemblance to the Ten Commandments. “You have to have rules to live by—nations need it, the world needs it, humanity needs it,” he explains. “I thought if we’re gonna start over with a parallel set of rules, voluntary initiatives would be more acceptable because people don’t want to be commanded anymore today.”


From Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerenblankfeld/2011/09/21/ted-turners-plans-to-save-the-world/


Some States Like it HOT
Many air travelers in the United States gladly pay extra - sometimes a lot extra - to ride in first class rather than coach. Up front, they enjoy roomier seats, faster boarding, and free drinks. And now the pay-to-be-pampered idea has come to America's interstate highways as well.
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Many of these high-speed roads already have special, uncrowded HOV or high-occupancy-vehicle lanes. Only cars carrying two or more, or sometimes three or more, people can use them. The idea is that these less-crowded HOV lanes will entice other drivers to join a car pool so that they, too, can enjoy life in the fast lane.


But experience has shown that most lone drivers just won't give up their cars. And they're getting angrier and angrier at the lucky drivers zipping along in the HOV lanes. So to appease them, ease traffic congestion in the regular lanes, and create a new revenue source, many states have embraced a concept called "HOT lanes."


"HOT" stands for "high-occupancy toll," and here's how it works:


As in HOV lanes, drivers of cars with multiple occupants pay little or nothing to zip along in the HOT lanes. But for a steep toll, drivers with no one else in their car can use them, too. Like first-class airplane passengers, many lone drivers say they'll happily pay the charge just to cut some time and hassles from their commutes.


Virginia, Georgia, and California are among the states building HOT lanes alongside existing superhighways. They argue that the extra money single drivers kick in for access to the HOT lanes will help pay for other transportation improvements, such as light-rail lines.


But what if so many lone drivers jump at this chance that HOT lanes become just as jammed and slow-moving as regular ones?


American capitalism has the answer. If single-occupancy cars start plugging up the HOT lanes, states plan to just keep raising their tolls. Then, presumably, enough drivers will slink back to the equivalent of the coach section of the road, enabling traffic in the HOT lanes to move briskly again.
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From VOA:
http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Standard_English/Some-States-Like-it-HOT-43230.html






Europe Split on Rescue Plan
World Urges Swift Action; Germany Opposes Expanded Bailout; Anxiety at IMF


WASHINGTON—European officials are debating ways to boost the firepower of their financial-bailout fund after the world's finance ministers, worried about the potential for a market meltdown, ratcheted up pressure on euro-zone officials to act.
During meetings of the International Monetary Fund in Washington over the weekend, the U.S. and other major nations pressed European leaders to increase the effective size of their ?40 billion ($594 billion) rescue fund to perhaps trillions of euros by borrowing against it.
The talks are at a early stage, and it is far from clear they can forge a political consensus to act. German officials say the idea is moot as long as the European Central Bank continues to reject it. Some European officials hope the central bank might soften its stance under incoming president Mario Draghi, but his views on the issue aren't known.
U.S. officials are urging quick action to calm the markets, but public opposition from Germany and Northern euro-zone countries suggests no agreement is likely before the Group of 20 industrialized and developing economies meet in early November.
Policy makers are "focused on their own internal restraints, so that we don't have the outcome that we need," Antonio Borges, head of the IMF's Europe department, said Sunday. While key players were understandably acting in self-interest, he said, it was generating "disastrous" collective results.
At one closed-door meeting, euro-zone officials revealed their reluctance to move forward too quickly because of politics at home.
"This is as fast as we can move. It's going to take six weeks" to weigh the options, one euro-zone official said, and others echoed his comments, according to one person in the room. In response, some leaders from outside the euro zone asked, "Do you have six weeks?"
At a meeting of the IMF's policy-setting committee, a parade of leaders from outside the currency bloc pressed euro-zone leaders to take quicker action. "If you're sitting in the [meeting] and every non-European is saying get it done, it makes quite an impression," another participant said.
The IMF and euro-zone officials are working on a variety of options for using leverage to make the resources of the rescue fund, called the European Financial Stability Facility, or EFSF, go much further, say those involved in the discussions. But such a plan would only be considered if all 17 euro-zone legislatures approve a July 21 agreement to broaden the bailout fund in other ways. Some European officials worry that even discussing the leveraging options publicly could make it harder to pass the July agreement.
Some of the options could be used to help prevent a Greek default, or to try to insulate the rest of the euro zone from such a default by pushing capital into European banks and building a fire wall around larger, vulnerable euro-zone nations.
Investors are questioning whether the bailout fund is large enough to respond effectively to the debt crisis as larger countries such as Italy and Spain face upward pressure on their borrowing costs. The ECB is reluctantly buying both countries' bonds to put a lid on yields, but has warned that it won't keep up its bond purchases for long.
In private conversations, the U.S. continued to push the Europeans, particularly the Germans, on the importance of coming up with large amounts of money, a position that European Commission officials accept. President Barack Obama has called German Chancellor Angela Merkel repeatedly in recent months to encourage her to take strong action to prevent the currency crisis from escalating further.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has met with European leaders over the past three weekends, in France, Poland and now Washington. He is pressing euro-zone governments on several key points: expand the firepower of the rescue fund; forge closer ties between the European Central Bank and euro-zone governments; ensure that euro-zone nations can borrow at affordable rates; and ensure that European governments stand behind their banking systems.
"The threat of cascading default, bank runs, and catastrophic risk must be taken off the table, as otherwise it will undermine all other efforts, both within Europe and globally," Mr. Geithner said Saturday.
During one closed-door session, Mr. Geithner stressed the need for swift action and relayed some of his experiences addressing the 2008 financial crisis, when he was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Mr. Geithner also talked with finance ministers or central bankers from a number of countries.
Germany isn't opposed in theory to leveraging the EFSF, but sees a number of practical problems with the idea and is refusing to be forced to make quick decisions, according to people familiar with the government's position. Germany's parliament is due to vote on Sept. 29 on legislation to increase the rescue fund's lending capacity to ?40 billion and give it new powers, including the right to buy bonds in secondary markets and provide funds for governments to recapitalize banks.
Mrs. Merkel is trying to prevent a rebellion within her coalition on the issue. Raising the specter of a more-radical revamp of the EFSF would make it even harder to keep her lawmakers in line. Growing hostility of German lawmakers and voters to more-generous bailout aid for euro members means that additional measures will be hard to ratify even after the Sept. 29 vote.
The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, told reporters that the bailout fund can only work within the legal framework of the European Union's treaty, and more specifically, within the agreement governing the bailout fund. Neither of those allows the facility to be leveraged, he said.
A number of ECB officials have rejected the leverage idea. But on Sunday, executive board member Lorenzo Bini Smaghi of Italy became the first ECB official to publicly throw his weight behind the idea of leveraging the bailout fund to stem the crisis.


From WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204010604576592830020996482.html?mod=WSJAsia_hpp_LEFTTopStories

diyangyang

沙发沙发~~终于轮我坐咯~
读文去咯~

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羊羊貌似把4的后面一段和5的前一段合在一起看了...
ps:好多单词不晓得 词汇量有待扩充啊...

fox0923

1'32"
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小影熊

1’10’’
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其实我完全没读懂

ykelly123

今天的速度有点虐还是只有我这样觉得？。。
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daisyの小夢想

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daisyの小夢想

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1.  meetings of the International Monetary Fund urge  euro-zone to take quick actions
different opinion:
a. urge Euro-zone to provide more money for the rescue of recession in Europe.
b. Euro-zone officials claimed that they needed 6 weeks to discuss the options and decide what to do. But many opponents thinked that 6 weeks are too long.
2. the euro-zone wants to establish a fund--EFSF to help solve the financial problem in euro-zone
but the euro-zone countries need to reach an agreement and sign the July agreement.
3. Assessment on the funding idea

...

phoebe0624

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裤裤melo

额`daisy~我表示压力很大。。。文章好长，没怎么细读明白，就读了个大概。。。

92s
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对不住羊羊和nana欺骗你们我睡觉了跑来这里做阅读。。。哎。。。时间好紧。。。亚历山大啊~哈哈~

明天开始做越障~
和你们一起奋斗~~~~~

bananazoo

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睡前最后来请个假~这两天的作业就暂时不做啦~过几天马上归队~