Rena 20号正式回来~~~@every队友：爱你们!!!

Rena张

今天提前做了速度越障了~~贴上来贴上来~~~
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速度
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Health-care reform on trial
Full-court press
Barack Obama’s health-care law moves to America’s highest court, and looks to be in danger. The case could transform the power of the federal government
摘自:http://www.economist.com/node/21551510.
IT WAS 9.30am and the Supreme Court was packed. The day before, the court had heard arguments on a procedural issue—whether the suit challenging Barack Obama’s health-care law should be postponed. But on March 27th the court was to consider the heart of the case. Is the law’s “individual mandate”, a requirement that everyone buy health insurance, constitutional or not? The answer is crucial to Mr Obama’s fortunes and much more. Uphold the requirement, Democrats predict, and American health care will be transformed. Republicans say that forcing people to buy something they may not want is a huge extension of federal power and a savage blow to individual liberty.
Those hoping for a seat to watch the event had queued overnight, even as a cold spell threatened the city’s cherry blossoms. Most spots had long been claimed by bureaucrats and politicians. Reporters sat shoulder-to-shoulder in three tight rows against a wall. At last the nine justices entered. For the next two hours Mr Obama’s law endured its most withering assault yet.
The president ought to be used to criticism of his health reforms. Republicans have spent many happy years attacking them. Outside the court, protesters held signs (“NObamacare”, “Kill the bill”) that have long lost their power to shock. Mr Obama signed his bill on March 23rd 2010; Florida and 12 other states challenged it minutes later. Despite all this, the arguments in the Supreme Court managed to surprise. The possibility that the mandate might fall now seems real and imminent.
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Florida has since been joined by 13 other states, the National Federation of Independent Business and four individuals. Though attention has centred on the mandate, the court also considered three other issues: whether a ruling must wait until 2015; whether the states can be obliged to expand Medicaid, the public health programme for the poor; and whether the rest of the law must fall if the mandate is struck down. The court usually hears a suit’s argument for one hour. For this case, it devoted six, spread over three days.
It is always hard to predict how the Supreme Court will rule, but the task is easier for at least one question. The Anti-Injunction Act bars legal challenges to taxes before those taxes have been collected. The mandate will take effect in 2014; those who do not buy insurance will be penalised the next year. On March 26th the court considered whether the act requires a ruling to be delayed until 2015. Neither the challengers nor Mr Obama want to postpone. The justices were similarly wary.
Guessing the fate of the Medicaid expansion is trickier. Washington and the states share the cost of Medicaid, but the federal government foots well over half the bill. In 2014 Mr Obama’s law will expand Medicaid to childless adults with incomes of up to 138% of the poverty level. Washington gives so much cash, the states say, that they cannot refuse Congress’s new terms. No lower court agreed with the states. On March 28th Mr Obama’s solicitor-general, Donald Verrilli, argued that this is not the first time that Congress has expanded Medicaid. Yet John Roberts, the chief justice, seemed sceptical. “Co-operative federalism is a beautiful thing,” declared Paul Clement, the lawyer for the 26 states. “Mandatory federalism has very little to recommend it.”
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The future of the individual mandate is even more uncertain. The challengers have simplicity on their side. They argue that Congress cannot compel individuals to buy something. Its powers are only those enumerated in the constitution. Let Congress regulate inactivity, challengers say, and there will be no limit to its meddling.
Mr Obama’s lawyers must rely on a more complex chain of reasoning. America’s huge health sector, they point out, is dysfunctional. People with pre-existing health conditions pay extortionate rates for their insurance, if they can get it at all. In part because of this, some 50m people have no insurance cover; yet many of them receive emergency care they cannot pay for. This raises the cost to everyone else; by an average of about $1,000 each year per family, the government argues.
The health law attempts to remedy these failings by requiring insurers to cover the sick without raising their fees. The mandate, by insuring more healthy people, would help offset these costs and fix the problem of uncompensated care. The mandate is constitutional for two reasons, says the government. The penalty falls within Congress’s power to tax (though Mr Obama has denied the mandate is any such thing). And the constitution’s “commerce clause” authorises Congress to regulate interstate activity. Not buying insurance is a decision to pay for your own care, the reasoning goes. This has a big effect on interstate commerce, though arguably by similar logic one might oblige people to buy gym memberships or broccoli.
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On a sticky wicket
These arguments were distilled in the lower courts long ago. The nine justices have pored over legal briefs from both sides. Nevertheless, the arguments before the court itself mattered. It was a chance for each lawyer to turn justices to his cause. Given the suit’s serious nature, explained Anthony Kennedy, a crucial swing vote on the bench (see Lexington), it was up to Mr Verrilli to prove the mandate’s constitutionality. He didn’t seem to.
Arguing before the Supreme Court is not easy, but if there is one person who should be used to it, it is Mr Verrilli; that is his main job. Yet Mr Obama’s chief lawyer began unsteadily, stopped to sip water and never quite recovered. As everyone will eventually consume health care, he explained, Congress may regulate the way Americans pay for it. Yet Mr Verrilli made these points shakily. Several times the court’s liberal justices interrupted to make his argument for him.
Most crucially, Mr Verrilli seemed to make little progress in persuading conservative justices that allowing the mandate would not give Congress unlimited power. “Could you express your limiting principle as succinctly as you possibly can?” asked Samuel Alito, a conservative justice. Mr Verrilli’s answer was long and muddled.
After Mr Verrilli’s stumbles, the challengers swept through their arguments with bravado. “The mandate”, began Mr Clement, “represents an unprecedented effort by Congress to compel individuals to enter commerce in order to better regulate commerce.” He and the lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business, Michael Carvin, did face tough questions from justices appointed by Democrats. Sonia Sotomayor, put on the court by Mr Obama in 2009, pressed Mr Clement particularly hard.
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Nevertheless, the prospect for the mandate looked much bleaker after the hearing than before it. It had seemed possible that Messrs Kennedy and Roberts might side with the four justices appointed by Democrats. Some even mused that Antonin Scalia, the court’s most vocal conservative, might support the mandate; in 2005 he agreed that Congress could regulate the growing of marijuana for personal medical use. Such hopes were dampened. Mr Roberts was relatively even-handed. Mr Scalia was sceptical. Mr Kennedy’s comments were particularly damning. “The government is saying that the federal government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act…” he observed, “and that changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way.” Most Americans seem to agree (see chart).
When the arguments came to a close at the end of March 28th, Mr Obama faced one hopeful prospect—the court might uphold the mandate—and several nightmares. The court could strike down the Medicaid expansion, which could embolden states to threaten other programmes. The court could strike down the mandate and, possibly, the entire law. In their hearing on March 28th, some justices shuddered at the thought of combing the law’s 2,700 pages for other unconstitutional provisions. Mr Scalia seemed to side with Mr Clement, noting: “My approach would be to say if you take the heart out of the statute, the statute’s gone.”
Arguably even worse, the justices could scrap the mandate but leave a few provisions that seem mad without it. An appellate court in Atlanta overturned the mandate but let the rest of the law stand. This would be catastrophic for insurers, who would face a “death spiral” as people delayed taking out insurance until they got ill, knowing they could still get cheap rates.
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自由阅读
The Supreme Court is expected to issue its decision by the end of June. By then the Republicans will probably have chosen a presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who signed a mandate of his own in Massachusetts (he says it is fine for states to do this but not Washington). However the court rules, the political consequences will be huge. Even more important, for the long term, will be the court’s articulation of congressional power. Washington subsists on hyperbole. But this time it is all true.
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越障
Bees and insecticides
Subtle poison
Evidence is growing that commonly used pesticides, even when employed carefully, are bad for bees
摘自: http://www.economist.com/node/21551451
IN THE winter of 2006 beekeepers in America noticed something odd—lots of their hives were dying for no obvious reason. As the months passed, reports of similar phenomena began coming in from their European counterparts. Mystified scientists coined the label “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) to describe what was happening. Since then, much brow-sweat has been expended trying to work out just what CCD really is.
Dying bees are a problem, and not just for apiarists. Bees pollinate many of the world’s crops—a service estimated to be worth $15 billion a year in America alone. And there is no shortage of theories to explain the insects’ decline. Climate change, habitat destruction, a paralysing virus, fungal infection and even a plague of parasitic mites have all been proposed. But one of the leading ideas is that the bees are suffering from the effects of neonicotinoids, a class of commonly used pesticides, introduced in the 1990s, which are toxic to insects but much less so to mammals.
Two papers published this week in Science lend weight to this idea. The first, from a group led by Penelope Whitehorn and David Goulson of the University of Stirling, in Britain, examined the effects these insecticides have on bumblebees, which are closely related to honeybees. Bumblebees are less studied than their honeybee cousins, but they also pollinate many commonly eaten crops, including strawberries, raspberries and runner beans.
The two researchers and their colleagues raised 75 bumblebee colonies in their laboratory. They exposed some, via contaminated pollen and sugar water, to high doses of imidacloprid, a type of neonicotinoid insecticide. Others were exposed to low doses (half as much as the high dose), or to no dose at all. Then, after two weeks of this treatment, the colonies were taken into the outside world and left there for six weeks, to see how the bees did.
All of the doses of imidacloprid, both high and low, that Dr Whitehorn gave her bees were “sublethal”—in other words, insufficient to kill the insects outright. Firms that produce pesticides, and the authorities that regulate them, are aware of the importance of bees to food production, and new products must be tested to make sure they are not fatal to helpful insects. But Dr Whitehorn found that even non-lethal doses of pesticide were bad for bees. Both the high-dose and the low-dose colonies grew more slowly than the undosed ones, gaining 8-12% less weight on average.
More importantly, the pesticides drastically inhibited the production of queens, which are needed to establish new nests each spring. (Unlike those of honeybees, bumblebee colonies do not survive the winter; they must be refounded by a hibernating queen.) The undosed colonies produced 13.7 queens, on average. Those given a small dose of insecticide produced two. Those given a high dose produced just 1.4. Worryingly, even colonies given the high dose may have got off lightly compared with their wild brethren. The researchers note that another British study found levels of imidacloprid in rape crops that were seven times higher than the food supplied by the researchers.
Dr Whitehorn’s paper does not propose a mechanism by which pesticides do their damage. But the second study, by a group led by Mickaël Henry at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, in Avignon, may shed some light on the matter. Inspired by previous laboratory-based work, which had suggested that sublethal doses of neonicotinoids damage honeybees’ memories, their ability to forage, and their ability to navigate back to their hive afterwards, Dr Henry decided to conduct some tests in the wild.
To that end, he and his colleagues glued tiny radio transmitters to the thoraxes of worker bees. These triggered a detector on the hive whenever a worker bearing one returned from a foraging trip. Some hives were given realistic doses of thiamtethoxam, a variety of neonicotinoid, while others were left alone. Dr Henry found that around twice as many treated bees as untreated ones failed to return to the hive. That, mathematical models indicate, might easily cause a hive to collapse.
Colony club
Moreover, even if it did not do so alone, it could be a contributing factor. Many researchers believe the label “colony collapse disorder” covers a multitude of problems; that would account for the long list of possible causes. But neonicotinoids have the explanatory virtue of being a fairly recent development and also one which, as these two pieces of work suggest, could be a common factor in weakening a colony without actually pushing it over the edge. The killer blow would then be administered by something else: a mite infestation, perhaps, or a fungal infection, or whatever else happened to turn up that a healthy hive would have shrugged off. A paper published earlier this year in Naturwissenschaften, for example, showed that even small doses of neonicotinoids weakened bees’ resistance to Nosema, a common fungal parasite.
A few countries, including France, Germany and Slovenia, have already restricted the use of neonicotinoids because of worries about their effects on bees. It would help other places that are thinking of following suit if more realistic trials were conducted in the future, in conditions that mimic nature as closely as possible in the way that these two experiments have done. That might be more expensive than the present way of doing things, in which tests are mostly confined to laboratories and are concerned with finding out how much insecticide is needed to kill bees outright. But the growing evidence that insecticides damage bees in subtle ways means it would be money well spent.
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O wants to reform Health care\ the court was packed. Whether the issue should be constitutional or not was the point discussed there. If the issue is passed, then XX and XX will be transformed. O ought to be used to criticism of his health reforms. Protesters cannot shock O. O signed the bill on XX day. The possibility that XX might fall seems real now.   01:59
The court has three issues: 1), whether the ruling must delay till 2015. 2), whether ... expand to the poor. 3), ........(不懂是虾米). Each of the issue may be discussed for hours, even days. Nor the court or O wants to postpone. .................  01:56
The future of the mandate is uncertain. The challengers argue that congress cannot compel people to buy the insurance. O needs more complex reasoning. The mandate is constitutional for 2 reasons, XX and XX.(不明白).  01:32
The lawyer of O on the court seems to be unconfident to argue over the issue. Mr. V .........在court上的表现不尽如人意……(记不清了……)   01:48
Nevertheless, after the hearing the prospect of the mandate looked much bleaker......
(真心没怎么看懂……)  02:07

越障： 06:57
Bees are died for unknown reason.
Bees benefit many of our crops.
Then, scientists offer some possible reasons to the phenomenon. And they consider insecticide may come as the first killer.
They do an experiment. One group of the bumblebee is exposed to higher dose of N-xxx, and the other one is exposed to lower dose or none. Then these bumblebees are left to the nature again, but their ability to kill insect reduced.
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Worrying that their benefit insects may be killed by N-insecticide, many countries decided to restrict the use of N.

CCcarol

Rena亲加油~~~

搞G战士DB

我也来啦，Rena加油！

Rena张

Rena亲加油~~~

-- by 会员 CCcarol (2012/4/5 21:03:28)

亲奈滴carol同加油~~~

Rena张

我也来啦，Rena加油！

-- by 会员 搞G战士DB (2012/4/5 23:00:04)

嗯嗯~~~ 队长、DB都来看俺啦~~俺真开心~~~~~吼吼吼

Rena张

昨天的阅读没写回忆，所以就不贴上来了，今天的速度越障是俺贴的~俺预先浏览过了~所以没计时~~~也不贴了……嘻嘻嘻……
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今天的OG-SC又错好多~~~桑心……
不能心急，我得一来，认真解决~~~要认真！！！
OG才是王道~

Rena张

每天都有不能按时完成的任务~~~ sigh~

方可恨悠悠

我属于基础爆差型- -

我最好的是口语可惜完全用不到。。

和楼主背景一样。。。一起加油吧

cathynine

Rena 加油啦~
不要急 一步一个脚印按计划来就好啦！ 晚安！

搞G战士DB

我是来给你信心的，哈哈。我OG SC第一遍正确率才不到百分之五十，没事儿的哈，第一遍就混个眼熟，知道再考什么，再去看语法笔记曼哈顿什么的，效果会很好的！OG多刷几遍会有很多新的收获的。晕，说的好像我自己很牛似地……惭愧惭愧……
睡咯，Rena晚安~
ps：你贴的小分队我没补，愧疚！