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今晚是很难忘的一晚，兴奋得差点忘记自己值班了，哈哈。
阅读小分队，我们一直都在。
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New Zealand's Second City Rises Again After Earthquake Disaster
Officials in New Zealand's second largest city say it will cost more than $15 billion to rebuild parts of Christchurch that were devastated earlier this year by an earthquake. In February, a magnitude 6.3 quake killed 181 people and left much of the city center in ruins. Thousands of homes have been left uninhabitable. Damage in Christchurch
The epicenter of one of New Zealand's worst natural disasters was close to the Christchurch suburb, Lyttleton, 12 kilometers from the city center.
More than seven months after the February 22 quake, efforts to rebuild the city are progressing, albeit slowly.
Thousands of residents have left the city and many of those who remain, such as Lisa Brignall, a migrant from South Africa, are feeling the strain, as aftershocks continue to shake the ground.
Coping with hardship
"It takes its toll," she said. "My husband has even considered, you know, leaving for the sake of our sanity. Yes. It's hard."
"So, were are going in through the study door which is pulled away from the house a wee [small] bit and there is a big bucket here to collect the rainwater. There is a big hole in the roof there," said Christchurch resident Siobhan Grimshaw, when she describes the wrecked shell of her home in the city's Mount Pleasant district. Grimshaw and her husband, David, are among thousands of residents waiting for their ruined homes to be rebuilt, as insurance companies continue the mammoth task of assessing a vast number of damaged properties.
"One, we haven't really got a choice because all our money is invested into our house, so if we walk away we would be bankrupt," she added. "Two, I love New Zealand, I love living here. I love Christchurch. I love the community. The people are just amazing.??
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"I think we'll end up with a better house at the end of the day, even though we have spent a lot of money getting to where we are," continued Grimshaw. "Yeah, I'm keen to get back and let's hope we can do it sooner rather than a lot later."
"I definitely thought I was going to die a few times," she said. "With the first big earthquake in September that was really terrifying. "We'd obviously never been in an earthquake before and, in February, I saw the city center buildings come down and the clouds of dust, and a lot of injured people."
Rebuilding plans
City officials have announced plans to rebuild its central business district as a low-rise precinct dominated by parkland.
Buildings will be restricted to a maximum of seven stories and constructed to rigorous standards, to avoid the damage and loss of life inflicted by the earthquake that tore through Christchurch in February.
Mayor Bob Parker says, in the next 20 years, the city will emerge as a safe, sustainable, low-rise garden city.
"The energy that had been stored in the Earth has largely dissipated," he said. "In many ways, we emerge one of the safest areas now in New Zealand and indeed around the earthquake ring of fire around the Pacific, to live in because we will be safer. We will be built to a very high level of seismic sustainability. And, we will be in an area which to all intents and purposes has fired its bullets. And, we should expect gradually a much more relaxed seismic environment for hundreds of years into the future."
Already 6,000 homes have been abandoned and are considered to be on land that is too unstable for them to be rebuilt. Thousands of other properties have yet to be fully assessed and they, too, could be condemned.
Then, there is the damage to roads, as well as sewers and water systems.
The Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority was set up by the New Zealand government to lead recovery work.
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City's future
Its chief executive, Roger Sutton, is optimistic about the city's future.
"A lot of cities in the world do not have good quality earthquake insurance. Christchurch, in general, most people have insurance, most people's land is insured as well," said Sutton. "So, a lot of money is going to flow into the city through the insurance and re-insurance industry and that is going to make a very big difference.
The scale of it, you know, NZ$20 billion in damage that is about 10 percent of New Zealand's GDP [gross domestic product]," continued Sutton. "So in terms of natural disasters this is getting right up there. I think the Japanese earthquake was one or two percent of their GDP. This is 10 percent of our GDP. So without that very high level of insurance we have got this would be a much, much bleaker city. The outlook would be much bleaker."????
Christchurch is being transformed and the skyline is slowly changing. But, for the displaced people here, change cannot come soon enough.
From VOA:
http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Standard_English/New-Zealands-Second-City-Rises-Again-After-Earthquake-Disaster-43287.html
Millions More Children to Receive Vaccines
The Global Alliance for Vaccine Immunization (GAVI) is providing new funding for vaccines in 37 more developing countries. Most are in sub-Saharan Africa. That brings the number of countries where GAVI provides childhood vaccines to 72.
"This is an unprecedented ramp-up for us to introduce new vaccines to poor children in poor countries," said Jeffrey Rowland, GAVI's chief spokesman.
Leveling the playing field
"Sixteen developing countries will receive funding to introduce the rotavirus vaccine. Rotavirus is the biggest cause of severe diarrhea in children under five years of age. And then 18 more countries will receive funding to introduce the pneumococcal vaccine. Pneumococcal disease causes pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis. Pneumonia and severe diarrhea are the two biggest childhood killers in the world in absolute terms," he said.
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Expanding the availability of these vaccines creates a level playing field.
"It means that children in poor countries finally have the same right as kids in richer countries, getting the same kinds of protection against vaccine preventable diseases. Kids in the United States, for example, have been receiving the vaccine against pneumonia since 2000," said Rowland.
Paying the bill
The GAVI Alliance held its first pledging conference in June. Donors promised $3.4 billion over the next 5 years. That's $600,000 more than GAVI had actually requested. GAVI officials say donors recognize that childhood vaccines have a very good return on investment.
The vaccine against pneumococcal disease costs about $3.50 per dose, while the rotavirus vaccine costs about $7.00 per dose. However an announcement is expected in October about a significant drop in price for the rotavirus vaccine.
While GAVI pays the bulk of the cost, countries are required to pay a share, usually about 20 cents per dose.
Sudan is among the countries now receiving the two vaccines, but South Sudan is not. Before they can be administered in South Sudan, at least 50 percent of the children there must be up to date on their vaccines for diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus. GAVI is currently working with health officials to make that happen.
In all, the alliance plans to immunize over 250 million children by 2015.
From VOA:
http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Standard_English/decapua-dev-countries-vaccines-sept-43275.html
US, EU to Increase Fight Against Illegal Fishing
European Union officials estimate that twenty percent of all fish are caught illegally. They say honest fishermen and their communities lose as much as twenty-three billion dollars worth of seafood every year.
The European Union and the United States are among the world's largest importers of seafood. This month they signed a joint agreement in Washington to increase cooperation against fish piracy. The problem is also known as illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, or IUU.
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Jane Lubchenco, the under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, signed the agreement for the United States. Maria Damanaki, the commissioner for maritime affairs and fisheries, signed it for the European Union.
They said the European Union and the United States are starting to identify illegal fishing ships and bar them from their ports. Countries are taking measures to document imported fish, they said. And they promised to seek stronger enforcement of fishery management measures.
Gerald Leape is senior officer for international policy at the Pew Environment Group in Washington. Mr. Leape says pirate fishing exists only because illegal operators find a place to sell their fish.
GERALD LEAPE: "The pirate fishermen undermine any attempt at achieving sustainable fisheries. They undermine the efforts of those fishermen who are playing by the rules to legally market the fish they catch."
Illegal fishing reduces market prices, making it harder for those who follow the law to compete. It can also increase the risk that fisheries will collapse.
Three billion people depend on seafood as their main source of protein. Ms. Lubchenco said the millions of tons of seafood pirated each year may represent as much as forty percent of the total catch in some fisheries.
The new agreement aims for greater action by governments to prevent illegal operators from making a profit. For example, port officials can prevent them from landing at their ports to sell their catch.
Gerald Leape says honest fishermen are not the only ones affected by the actions of fish pirates.
GERALD LEAPE "They undermine the efforts of scientists to set quotas to make sure that stocks of fish do not go extinct. And they undermine those regulators who are trying to determine who should catch what, and how to divide up what should be a sustainably managed catch. These are pirates in the truest sense of the word."
And that's the VOA Special English Agriculture Report, written by Jerilyn Watson. We have transcripts and MP3s of our reports, along with activities for people learning English, at 51voa.com. I'm Bob Doughty.
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From VOA:
http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Special_English/Fight-Against-Illegal-Fishing--43249.html
Schumpeter
The trouble with superheroes
HP has appointed yet another superstar boss from outside. Bad move
FIVE years ago Tom Perkins, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors, wrote a novel. “Sex and the Single Zillionaire” tells the story of a single zillionaire who accepts an invitation to appear on a reality-TV show, “Trophy Bride”, and is then confronted by a lot of sex (“Heather was nude upon the bed and Kim, above her, was also nude, but wearing some sort of complicated black leather harness…”). Rupert Murdoch, whose company HarperCollins published the book, pronounced it “a great read”. A more objective Amazon reviewer described it as “an argument in favour of book-burning”.
The plot of “Sex and the Single Zillionaire” is only slightly more improbable than the recent history of Hewlett-Packard (HP), a company for which Mr Perkins worked in the 1960s and on whose board he sat when he was writing his bonkbuster. For its first 60 years HP exemplified all that is admirable about Silicon Valley. It was a scrappy start-up that grew into a high-tech powerhouse thanks to relentless innovation and solid management principles (“the HP way”). But then things started to go wrong.
The company has lost six chief executives since 1999. Carly Fiorina was dumped in 2005 after HP’s share price halved; Mark Hurd in 2010, after a sex-and-expenses scandal. In 2005-06 the company was caught spying on board members, its own staff and the press in a doomed attempt to plug leaks. Mr Perkins, who resigned from the board over the spying scandal, told the New York Times that: “I didn’t know that there was such a thing as corporate suicide, but now we know that there is.” On September 22nd HP’s board sacked Léo Apotheker, Mr Hurd’s successor, after 11 months in office. A day later it appointed Meg Whitman, the former boss of eBay, an online-auction site, to replace him.
The tech world has endlessly debated what went wrong with HP. Is it just the passage of time? It is hard to reach old age in Silicon Valley: your technology goes stale, and young bruisers such as Google and Apple kick away your zimmer frame. Or is it HP’s dysfunctional board (which the eloquent Mr Perkins describes as “the worst board in the history of business”)? Apparently, HP hired Mr Apotheker without his ever meeting the full board.
Perhaps. But a resurgent IBM has just celebrated its 100th birthday, and the HP board has been remade several times in the past decade. There is a third possibility: that HP has fallen victim to the cult of the corporate saviour. It keeps reaching outside its ranks to hire a superstar as CEO. This is something HP never did during its glory days. And it never seems to work.
On the face of it, scouring the world for a superstar makes perfect sense. Surely a great manager can make all the difference to an ailing firm? Jack Welch boosted General Electric’s market capitalisation by 4,500% at a time when its old rival, Westinghouse, was disintegrating. Surely management skills are portable? What other justification is there for the giant MBA and executive-education businesses? And surely it is sensible to cast your net as widely as possible in search of the world’s fizziest talent? In the 1970s only about 15% of all CEO vacancies in Forbes 1,000 firms were filled by outsiders. By the early 2000s the share had climbed to 33%. It is even higher in the high-tech industry.
Companies can point to one strong piece of evidence in favour of hiring outsiders: share prices usually leap at the news. But a gathering pile of academic studies points to the opposite conclusion. Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great”, insists that great companies almost always recruit CEOs from within. Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School argues that looking outside for a “corporate saviour” erodes the morale of the talent within. An unpublished paper presented to the annual conference of the American Accounting Association in August by Richard Cazier of Texas Christian University and John McInnis of the University of Texas at Austin brings a new level of rigour to the debate.
Messrs Cazier and McInnis studied 192 CEOs who had been brought in from outside between 1993 and 2005. They discovered that companies usually recruit CEOs from companies that have done well in the past—no surprise there—and that they usually pay them a fat premium. But then comes the rub: the pay premium is negatively correlated with the future performance of the firm that does the hiring. In other words: the more dazzling the outside recruit, the worse he performs in his new role.
Corporate culture matters more than stars
This may be because superstars have an inflated opinion of their own abilities. They assume all the credit for the success of their previous firm, when in fact many others were involved. And they imagine that they can transform a corporate culture single-handed. Usually, they can’t. The authors observe that the tendency to hire CEOs who have done well elsewhere is most common among firms “with busy and inattentive boards”.
Some outside hires succeed. Lou Gerstner revived IBM despite being a high-tech outsider (he was previously at McKinsey and American Express). But HP is surely tempting fate by appointing a fourth outside CEO (or near-outsider, given that she has spent a few months on the board).
Ms Whitman is also a superstar, which does not bode well. She made a fortune by taking eBay public. But she flagged badly as the company grew into a mature business—ie, as it became more like HP. She also failed when she tried to translate her corporate fame into a political career. In 2010 she ran for the governorship of California. (As it happens, she stood shoulder to padded Republican shoulder with Ms Fiorina, who was running for the Senate.) Both lost miserably, despite a pro-Republican tide. Ms Whitman spent $100m of her own money and still lost by 13 points against an eccentric bald guy. Something tells us that the HP story has more unsettling chapters still to come.
From The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/21530953
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发表于 2011-9-30 22:01:39
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