Olivia的阅读小分队日记

olivia瓜瓜

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Europe's Economic Problems Linked to Rise inSuicides
A study says morepeople are killing themselves in Greece and other countries affected byeconomic troubles in Europe. David Stuckler, a sociologist at Britain'sUniversity of Cambridge, co-wrote the report.
DAVID STUCKLER: "For themost part, the countries that have been more severely affected have experiencedgreater rises in suicides -- Ireland, Spain, the Baltics -- reaching up tosixteen percent in some of the worst affected countries, like Greece."
Suicide rates in Europe hadbeen decreasing. But then the international banking crisis hit in two thousandeight.
The study looked at reportsfrom ten European countries from two thousand seven and two thousand nine. Nineof the ten countries had a five percent increase in suicide rates between twothousand seven and two thousand nine. In Ireland the increase was thirteenpercent.
The study found that suiciderates have not increased in countries where governments have helped get peopleback to work. Examples include Sweden and Finland.
DAVUD STUCKLER: "Wefound that just giving money to people who have lost jobs to replace theirincome did not appear to help. Instead, giving people a reason to get out ofbed in the morning, a hope in terms of searching for a good, meaningful jobseemed to be the most beneficial to helping people cope."
The findings appeared lastweek in the Lancet medical journal.
Greece is suffering the costsof a huge public deficit. For over a year, the government has cut spending andincreased taxes in an effort to improve its finances.
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Pavlos Tsimas is a journalistbased in Greece. He recently made a documentary about the increase in suicides.
PAVLOS TSIMAS: "Weinvestigated the case of a small businessman from Herakleion in Crete, who tookhis car, loaded it with tins of petrol, and first shot himself and then putfire to the whole car."
Pavlos Tsimas says somepeople commit suicide in a public way, like the businessman in Crete.
PAVLOS TSIMAS: "We foundout that people killed themselves in a very dramatic and sometimes a veryviolent way, which maybe means that they are trying to make their suicide astatement, want the whole world to understand how badly they feel, how hopelessthey have felt."
He says Greeks who killthemselves are mostly men. And he says the number has gone up most on theisland of Crete.
PAVLOS TSIMAS: " ...where social and family life is more traditional, more patriarchic. The fatherof the family has to be respected as a figure of great strength. And when theeconomic problems arise, when jobs are lost and businesses are closed down, itis this despair because of the loss of respect, the loss of self-esteem, andthe fact that the person feels that his life no longer has meaning, that drivesthem to this kind of act."
And that's the VOA SpecialEnglish HealthReport. For more health news, go to 51voa.com. I'm Jim Tedder.
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SOURCE: VOA special English
http://www.51voa.com/VOA_Special_English/Europe-Suicide-42399.html
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Billie Holiday, 1915-1959: The LadySang the Blues
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: I'm ShirleyGriffith.
STEVE EMBER: And I'm SteveEmber with the VOA Special English program, PEOPLE IN AMERICA. Every week wetell about a person important in the history of the United States. This week,we tell about Billie Holiday. She was one of the greatest jazz singers inAmerica.
(MUSIC:"God Bless theChild")
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: That wasBillie Holiday singing one of her famous songs. She and Arthur Herzog wrote it.Billie Holiday's life was a mixture of success and tragedy. Her singingexpressed her experiences and her feelings.
STEVE EMBER: Billie Holidaywas born Eleanora Fagan in nineteen fifteen in Baltimore, Maryland. Her parentswere Sadie Fagan and Clarence Holiday. They were young when their daughter wasborn. Their marriage failed because Clarence Holiday was not at home much. Hetraveled as a musician with some of the earliest jazz bands.
Sadie Fagan cleaned people'shouses. But she could not support her family on the money she earned. So shemoved to New York City where the pay was higher. She left her daughter inBaltimore with members of her family.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: The younggirl Eleanora Fagan changed her name to Billie, because she liked a movie star,Billie Dove. Billie Holiday loved to sing. She sang and listened to musicwhenever she could. One place near her home had a machine that played records.The building was a brothel where women who were prostitutes had sex with menfor money.
Billie cleaned floors and didother jobs for the prostitutes so she could listen to the records. It was therethat young Billie first heard the records of famous black American bluesartists of the nineteen twenties. She heard Bessie Smith sing the blues. Andshe heard Louis Armstrong play the horn. Both musicians had a great influenceon her.
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STEVE EMBER: Billie Holidayonce said: "I do not think I'm singing. I feel like I am playing a horn.What comes out is what I feel. I hate straight singing. I have to change a tuneto my own way of doing it. That is all I know."
Here is Billie Holidaysinging a popular song of the nineteen thirties, "More Than YouKnow."
(MUSIC)
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: BillieHoliday had a tragic childhood. When she was ten, a man sexually attacked her.She was accused of causing the man to attack her and sent to a prison forchildren.
In nineteen twenty-seven,Billie joined her mother in Harlem, the area of New York City whereAfrican-Americans lived. Billie's mother mistakenly sent her to live in abrothel. Billie became a prostitute at the age of thirteen. One day, sherefused the sexual demands of a man. She was arrested and spent four months inprison.
STEVE EMBER: Two years later,Billie's mother became sick and could not work. Fifteen-year-old Billie triedto find a job. Finally, she was given a job singing at a place in Harlem wherepeople went at night to drink alcohol and listen to music.
For the next seventeen years,Holiday was one of the most popular nightclub singers in New York. She alwayswore a long white evening dress. And she wore large white flowers in her blackhair. She called herself "Lady Day."
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: In theearly nineteen thirties, a music producer, John Hammond, heard Billie Holidaysing in a nightclub. He called her the best jazz singer he had ever heard. Hebrought famous people to hear her sing.
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Hammond produced Holiday'sfirst records. He got the best jazz musicians to play. They included BennyGoodman on clarinet, Teddy Wilson on piano, Roy Eldridge on trumpet and BenWebster on saxophone. They recorded many famous songs with Billie Holiday.
"I Wished on theMoon" is one of them.
(MUSIC)
STEVE EMBER: In the latenineteen thirties, Billie Holiday sang with Artie Shaw's band as it traveledaround the United States. She was one of the first black singers to performwith a white band. But racial separation laws in America made travel difficultfor her.

During this time, a new nightclub opened in the area of New York calledGreenwich Village. It was the first club that had both black and whiteperformers. And it welcomed both black and white people to hear the performers.The nightclub was called Cafe Society.
It was here that Billie Holidayfirst sang a song called "Strange Fruit." A school teacher namedLewis Allan had written it for her. The song was about injustice and oppressionof black people in the southern part of the United States. It told about howmobs of white men had killed black men by hanging them from trees.

Many people objected to the song. It was unlike any other popular song. But itwas a huge hit. Here is Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit."
(MUSIC)
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: In thenineteen forties, Holiday started using the illegal drug heroin. Soon her bodyneeded more and more of the drug. It began to affect her health.
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In nineteen forty-seven,Billie Holiday was arrested for possessing illegal drugs. She was found guiltyand sentenced to nine months in prison. When she was released, New York Cityofficials refused to give her a document that permitted her to work in anyplace that served alcoholic drinks. This meant Holiday no longer could sing innightclubs and jazz clubs. She could sing only in theaters and concert halls.
Ten days after her releasefrom jail, she performed at New York's famous Carnegie Hall. People filled theplace to hear her sing. This is one of the songs she sang at that concert. Itis called "I Cover the Waterfront."
(MUSIC)
STEVE EMBER: In nineteenfifty-six, Billie Holiday wrote a book about her life. The book was called"Lady Sings the Blues." A friend at the New York Post newspaper,William Dufty, helped her write the book. A few months later, she was arrestedagain for possessing illegal drugs. But instead of going to prison, she waspermitted to seek treatment to end her dependence on drugs. The treatment wassuccessful.
That same year, she performedher second concert at Carnegie Hall. Here is one of the songs Holiday sang thatnight. It is called "Lady Sings the Blues." She and Herbie Nicholswrote it.
(MUSIC)
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: BillieHoliday's health was ruined by using illegal drugs and by drinking too muchalcohol. Her last performance was in nineteen fifty-nine. She had to be led offthe stage after singing two songs. She died that year. She was only forty-four.But Lady Day lives on through her recordings that continue to influence thebest jazz singers.
(MUSIC: "You Go to MyHead")
STEVE EMBER: This SpecialEnglish program was written by Shelley Gollust. It was produced by Lawan Davis.I'm Steve Ember.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: And I'mShirley Griffith. Our programs are online with transcripts and MP3 files at51voa.com. And you can find us on Facebook and YouTube at VOA Learning English.Join us again next week for PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.

第一篇：差三行第二篇：差一行
第三篇：差三行 （还不错）嘿嘿
第四篇：差两行
第五篇：差一行

SOURCE: VOA SPECIAL ENGLISH

olivia瓜瓜

[越障2-11]

4-D Cinema Explores Shake, Rattle and Sniff Options
By Hugh Hart
July 15, 2011  
Movies that shake, rattle and roll viewers, or assault their senses of smell, might become the next big thing if a new wave of so-called 4-D technologies grabs filmgoers’ imaginations.
As the 3-D revolution spawned by 2009’s sci-fi stunner Avatar starts to lose some of its luster, the next logical step in immersive cinema could come from turning movies into a full-body experience.
“Let’s say you’ve got Harry Potter on his broomstick playing Quidditch,” said Guy Marcoux, vice president of marketing at D-Box Technologies, a Canadian firm that has motion-synchronized seats installed in 98 venues worldwide. “We will make you feel as if you are on that broomstick. If he banks left or right, you’ll feel that, or if he drops, we create that free-floating effect. And if wind is coming, you’ll feel vibration in your chair.”
D-Box’s hyperactive theater seats are one of several new technologies designed, like 3-D, to make movies more immersive for audiences and more profitable for studios. As cinema owners struggle to compete with personal home theaters decked out with massive screens, sphincter-rattling subwoofers and, increasingly, 3-D screens, 4-D gimmicks point toward a way to bring the “only in theaters” experience to the next level.
Working out of production offices in Burbank, California, D-Box’s motion designers spent about 350 hours writing code that will trigger bumps, jolts and jiggles for special screenings of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 when the franchise finale opens Friday.
“We have a database with more than 5,000 separate motion ‘waves,’” Marcoux told Wired.com by phone. The company’s “motion track” software responds frame by frame to on-screen action with “pitch, roll and heave” options.
Once studio post-production executives sign off on the motion work — directors don’t get involved — motion programming is encoded onto hard drives that are sent to specially equipped theaters to control chairs embedded with electromechanical pistons. D-Box splits revenues from the $8 premium charge with exhibitors and the studio.
Rival firm CJ CGV is working on pushing the 4-D experience even further. The company operates 13 4DPlex screens in South Korea, where moviegoers sit in vibrating chairs rigged with mist, “breeze” and fragrance effects synced to on-screen action. The Asian outfit will soon launch a demonstration laboratory in Los Angeles to showcase its theater technologies to Hollywood studios.
Confidentiality agreements prohibit the company from discussing details, CJ CGV’s regional director Martin Kim told Wired.com. “All I can tell you at this point is that we are opening a CJ 4DPlex showroom office (not a commercial theater) in Hollywood in September,” Kim said. “Our goal is to simply enhance the movie — not change it.”
Ride the Wild MovieThe types of 4-D thrills delivered by D-Box and 4DPlex resemble the movie-oriented rides at some theme parks, where the carnival-style variant on shake-rattle-and-spray cinema lures millions each year. Given that Hollywood producers routinely hype popcorn movies as being a “great ride,” it’s not surprising that attractions like Disneyland’s Star Wars-themed
Star Tours and Universal Studios Hollywood’s King Kong 360 3-D take the concept one step further. The jungle ride, developed with input from King Kong director Peter Jackson and opened last summer, flashes 3-D images of raptors and gorillas inside a darkened soundstage where visitors hurtle around in trams.In these popular film-ride hybrids, dialog, story and character arcs take a back seat — way back — to visceral sensation, but the theme-park model points toward a day when moviegoers may need to strap themselves into seatbelts as the opening credits roll.
3-D evangelist Jeffrey Katzenberg, who runs DreamWorks Animation, tested the 4-D movie-as-carnival-ride concept eight years ago when he produced Shrek 4D. To see the 13-minute featurette, audience members sat in chairs rigged with tubes that simulated breeze and mist as the characters sailed over the sea.
Katzenberg told the Los Angeles Times that once the story outline was agreed upon, “We said, ‘How can we embellish it,
how do we ‘ride’ this movie?” Universal Parks & Resorts vice president and designer Scott Trowbridge added: “3-D can bring the action off the screen, but then we came up with this idea of adding lots of special effects to create a fourth ‘D,’ so the movie basically lands in your lap.”Sight and SmellHollywood Takes a Sniff
The fourth dimension of smell enjoyed a brief if cheesy heyday half a century ago. Here’s a sampling.
Smell-O-Rama (1953) General Electric tests a scent generator that accompanies 3-D images of a rose.
AromaRama (1959) Scents are transmitted through theaters’ air-conditioning systems to accompany travel documentary Behind the Great Wall.
Smell-O-Vision (1960) Originally called Scentovision, this attempt used pipes connected to individual theater seats to transmit odors controlled by projectionists. The movie Scent of Mystery telegraphed plot points through odor when, for example, one character is identified by the smell of pipe tobacco.
Then there’s the Up Your Nose school of 4-D, celebrated by director Robert Rodriguez in his upcoming Spy Kids: All the Time in the World. Taking a playful approach to the fourth dimension, the Austin, Texas-based filmmaker revives the scratch-and-sniff concept introduced by John Waters in his 1981 Odorama movie, Polyester.
Rodriguez calls his version Aroma Vision in the grandiose spirit of 1950s gimmick king William Castle, creator of Percepto, Illusion-O and the Fright Break, ostensibly designed to give frightened viewers of 1961 horror flick Homicidal a chance to exit the theater before their nerves went haywire.
“I was inspired by this throwback to a kind of showmanship where you’re just trying to entertain an audience with anything you can think of that will enhance the experience,” Rodriguez told Wired.com by phone.
University of California at San Diego researcher Sungho Jin takes a more high-tech approach to scent-driven storytelling with a home entertainment prototype that could one day overpower the fake buttery smell of microwave popcorn whipped up by pajama-clad movie watchers.
In partnership with Samsung’s home entertainment division, Jin and his team devised an aroma-release prototype that relies on electrical filaments to vaporize up to 10,000 scented fluids contained in tiny rubber tubes. In a phone interview, Jin, who spent two years developing the matrix-based control technology, offered an example of how his device might work.
“If you’ve got a scene coming up where the character eats pizza, maybe five seconds earlier — because it takes time for the odor to travel to the viewer –the computer program essentially says, ‘OK, hit it!’ and that particular odor will be released,” Jin said.
Gimmickry vs. VisionDuring the 20th century, 4-D concepts like Smell-O-Vision and Castle’s creations proved to be an evolutionary dead end, never advancing beyond the novelty stage (see gallery for examples).
While the new breed of tactile technologies are far more sophisticated, it remains to be seen if moviegoers really crave a side helping of body-quaking, nose-tweaking stimulation to go with their traditional serving of cinematic eye candy.
If filmmakers focus creatively on making explosions and aerial flight feel as powerful as they look, a more literal kind of “motion picture” could take flight. But lacking auteur input, extra “dimensions” that get tacked on as a marketing afterthought could mean that 4-D Version 2.0 joins Percepto in the graveyard of movie-exhibition gimmicks.
Thumbs up or thumbs down? Would you be eager to see a 4-D movie complete with motion and scent effects? Or do you have your own wild ideas for how technology could make movies even more immersive? Weigh in below

10分钟

olivia瓜瓜

【速度2-10】

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Coming Out in China: The True Cost of Being Gay in BeijingAfter he left Tianjin last year, Zhang Xiaobai realized that homosexuals are not "rare birds."
When he was still in primary school, Zhang (not his real name) found that he was attracted to boys. Particularly after each physical-education class, when he looked at the sweat-soaked back of a boy he liked, he felt dazed. The feeling got stronger when he entered high school and fell secretly amorous of a tall and strong classmate. He was always eager to approach him and became fascinated with the occasional moment of physical contact.
That was in the mid-1990s, when the term homosexuality was far from ordinary in Chinese people's life. Zhang couldn't find anyone similar to him, and he thought he was strange. He couldn't tell his parents, sure that they wouldn't be able to understand. "I was trying to hide it from everybody. Nobody told me this is normal," Zhang recalls. "I felt like I was sick."
After graduating from university, family and friends were enthusiastic to fix him up with a girl. He didn't know how to refuse and finally yielded to the pressure, marrying a girl his parents liked. He was hounded by feelings of guilt and inadequacy. "But if I can't possibly love her, I can at least try my best to be a good husband," he says he told himself. So as not to disappoint his parents, Zhang and his wife had a son right after being married.
Each Valentine's Day and on their wedding anniversary, Zhang would buy his wife flowers and gifts, trying to compensate materially for his missing heart.
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Life went by. Nothing changed for more than 10 years. And then he started logging into the online world where gay Chinese interact. In some chat forums, people wanted to meet him, but he never accepted the invitation.
In 2009 Zhang took a work trip to Beijing. One night, after leaving a bar, he saw another bar at the other side of the road. He has seen the name so many times in a forum, a "shrine" for homosexuals, like Dongdan Park, said to be the biggest gathering place in the world for gays.
He knew there were similar places back in Tianjin but thought it was too risky that he might bump into acquaintances in those spots.
The next day, he went to the bar without letting his colleague know. The atmosphere was relaxed. Like at other bars, there were people trying to strike up conversation and flirting. For the first time in his 30 years of life, he was not denying his identity. He talked to all kinds of people from different professions. There were company employees, lawyers and a lot of media people.
In comparison with the digital world, the live encounter with other gays was a shock to him. When he finished his mission and went back to Tianjin, he was determined to leave his job. He told his family he wanted to look for advancement in Beijing. Nobody understood why. He just told them, "I'm already 30-something. It will be too late if I don't think for myself."

First Love
His wife stayed in Tianjin. They had gradually grown apart. She no longer demanded that he always come home. He made new acquaintances, and then found his lover, a designer in his 30s.
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This was the first love of his life. Like other couples, they went to films and chose which restaurants to go to after work. Though they kept separate places, Zhang was stable in his relations. He felt that he had found a new direction for his life. For the first time, he didn't feel so bad being gay. His friends and colleagues accepted him. He was finally completely relaxed.
It went on in this way for about a year, until 2010. He felt he was no longer able to leave his boyfriend and went home to Tianjin less frequently. He decided it was time to tell his family.
"I knew I had to be courageous," he says. "It was too difficult for me to continue with two emotions at the same time. I was prepared to break up with my family."
After New Year's Day this year, Zhang invited his wife, his parents and his parents-in-law to dinner. He announced the truth near the end of the meal. The fathers didn't quite believe him, and everybody at the table was startled. Then his mother, who has a hypertension problem, fainted. His wife smacked his face and left. He later cried and knelt in front of his father beside the hospital bed of his mother, asking for forgiveness.
"It was really like a second-rate TV drama," he says. "The whole family was crying. I had never imagined that it would ever happen to me."
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Zhang's wife divorced him without hesitation and won full custody of their son. Relatives scolded him, saying he was irresponsible. He tries to compensate everybody with money.He gave his house to his ex-wife and pays to support his parents, the cost of coming out. Zhang's parents are still in a cold war with him: his mother won't speak to him. He worries that his son will suffer from being laughed at when his friends find out that his father is gay.
Nevertheless, Zhang does not think his life is a tragedy and is relieved that at least now he is living according to his true identity. Every time he hears that some "comrade" plans to get married, he always tells them of his own experience: "Don't try to solve the problem by getting married. It will only hurt more people."

From TIME: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2082914,00.html

For some teens, a busy life takes fun out of high school
For years the University of California, Los Angeles, has done a national survey of first-year college students. Some of the questions in the Freshman Survey relate to emotional health and stress. Last year, 29 percent said they often felt "overwhelmed" by all they had to do in their last year of high school. That was two percentage points higher than the year before.
There was a big difference between men and women. Almost 40 percent of women reported feeling that level of stress, compared to just 18 percent of men.
Deborah Stipek is dean of the School of Education at Stanford University in California. She says a lot of students are under too much pressure from parents and schools.
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DEBORAH STIPEK: "They are not enjoying what can be the incredible satisfaction of learning and developing understandings and skills. Leaning can be an adventure. But instead of an adventure, it's really about the test, it's about the college application."
Professor Stipek recently wrote about this issue in the journal Science. She used the example of her own daughter in high school. Her daughter has taken advancement placement, or AP, courses in French to earn credit toward college. She told her mother she would be happy to never speak French again.
DEBORAH STIPEK: "I think that revealed the real basic problem, which is the AP courses that she was taking in French were not about learning French, not about being able to communicate with a different culture, or to travel, or to have a skill that could be useful in life. It was about getting a score on an AP test that would help her get into the college of her choice."
Professor Stipek says high schools should listen to their students.
DEBORAH STIPEK: "One of the things that schools are doing that we're working with is doing yearly surveys of students to find out what their sources of stress and anxiety [are], and get their ideas on what the school can do, what kinds of policies can be supportive of them. And this has been actually amazing, because we've gone into schools where they say 'This isn't a problem.' And then they do a survey of the students, and they are just blown away by what they get back from the students when the students are actually asked."
In 2009, a documentary film looked at the pressure on many students to succeed in school and in lives busy with activities and homework. The film is called "Race to Nowhere."
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STUDENTS: "If you were dedicating your whole life to your grades, you have to be smart. And you have to be involved in the arts. I have soccer practice every day. Plus the homework on top of that. Produce, produce, produce. It's impossible. I couldn't cope."
Deborak Stipek says the film shows that many students today are not experiencing the joys of learning.
DEBORAK STIPEK: "I was interviewed in it, as many others were, and I think the most compelling interviews were of the students. These are students who felt under enormous pressure to perform, and I want to underscore the word 'perform,' as opposed to 'learn.'"
She says the hardest lesson for society may be that young people will grow up lacking interest in learning.

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第三篇：57S
第四篇：差一行
第五篇：差一行
今天感觉还不错

olivia瓜瓜

【越障2-10】


As Ivory Coast Recovers, One Region is Stuckin a Cycle of Hate
At first, Honorie Guei was simply relieved she had survived thepost-electoral violence in Ivory Coast. But after 14 weeks in a crowded refugeecamp in the west of the country, the 31-year-old market trader has begun todespair.
"If we are working in the fields,our sweat cleanses us," Guei says, gesturing at the thick, hilly foreststhat dominate the landscape in the western region of Moyen Cavally. "Butall of us living here together, people are dying every day." She ispreparing to attend two funerals today, the latest victims of a choleraoutbreak in the camp. She worries, she says, that it will be her funeral next.(See images from the battle forthe Ivory Coast.)
Guei is one of around 30,000people who sought shelter in a Catholic churchyard in the western capital ofDuékoué when civil conflict engulfed much of Ivory Coast in December. Fourmonths of violence ensued, as former ruler Laurent Gbagbo refused to concededefeat in a run-off election to his rival, Alassane Ouattara.
These days, stores are reportinga brisk trade for the first time since April, when Ouattara's troops, with helpfrom French and United Nations forces, pulled a still-defiant Gbagbo from his bunkerin the presidential palace. On the back of the newly installed president'scan-do attitude, new businesses are springing up across the commercial capital,Abidjan. But as the rest of Ivory Coast sets off on the road to recovery, thewestern region lags behind, threatening to stall progress down the line.(See "In Ivory Coast, asAbidjan Is Ransacked, Where Is Gbagbo?")
Long an ungovernable tinderbox ofethnic tensions, the west was wracked with brutal fighting trigged by thedisputed elections. Potent xenophobia peddled by Gbagbo's government againstnortherners with migrant roots — who form the bulk of Ouattara's support base —was exacerbated by land disputes in the resource-rich and fertile region.Pro-Gbagbo militias, mainly from the southern ethnic tribes such as the Guéré,held sway in the region for over a decade and had complete impunity as theyregularly clashed with northerners. As the rebels allied to Ouattara sweptsouthwards to join forces with insurgents in Abidjan, the tables turned. OnApril 2, human-rights groups revealed three mass graves in Duékoué, in totalcontaining the bodies of up to 1,000 civilians — predominantly from the Guérétribe.
Ouattara has since appointed thedisparate rebel groups who backed him to the role of the national army,effectively legitimizing warlords who grew rich from racketeering andsmuggling. Although many Ivorians feel the president's hand was forced, sincehe owes his ascension to the rebels, his naming the head of the former rebelmovement as army chief left even some supporters worried. In other quarters,the move provoked intense anger.
"We've no homes to go tobecause the rebels burnt our village," Guei says. "It's an insult tous that warlords are now sitting at the president's table. If I were a man, I'dhave picked up a gun and started another rebellion myself." Another Guéréwoman nearby recounts how she was forced to sing and dance for pro-Ouattara fightersas they hacked off her husband's feet; yet another survived by hiding in thebush for four days. At checkpoints — made out of piles of dead bodies — thewomen were harassed and stripped of all their belongings. Men were sometimessummarily executed.
But not everyone sympathizes withthe plight of the families strewn across half a dozen refugee camps in thedistrict. "For years we were subject to daily terror by Gbagbo'ssupporters, who had complete immunity, just because we are northerners,"says cocoa farmer Kareem Ouedraogo, whose parents settled in Duékoué fromBurkina Faso. "Now they know how the other half lived."(See if Ivory Coast's Presidentcan heal the nation's wounds.)
The mutual suspicion andresentment is shared by many, and highlights the major obstacles reconciliationefforts must surmount. At a local community meeting in Duékoué on July 6, anannouncement of plans by non-governmental organizations to build a new villagefor Guéré survivors was heckled down. Building a new village, one northernvillage chief explains, would lead to segregation. "When our parents hadtheir homes destroyed, we were forced to rebuild them with our own hands. Itshould be an eye for an eye before we start talking reconciliation," headds.
And there are other problems. A200-km-long porous border with Liberia, itself recovering from back-to-backwars, makes the area difficult to police. In a region awash with weapons, thenumber of armed robberies on the already notorious roads have shot upwardssince Ouattara's soldiers took power, residents from both sides of thepolitical divide agree. With no formal census for the new army, manypro-Ouattara civilians have simply donned combat fatigues and picked up guns.
"Insecurity in the regionhas increased lately, but that's why we are also increasing patrols," asoldier at one of the periodic, bullet-ridden checkpoints in the area says. Inthe past two weeks, 14 deaths and dozens of injuries have been recorded at thelocal police station, he adds.(See the result of grislystandoffs in Ivory Coast.)
Ouattara has said that he'spresident for all Ivorians, irrespective of tribal divisions. Meanwhile, aheadof potentially explosive legislative elections, the government has pledged toinstall eight military bastions across the two districts that make up thewestern region. But questions remain as to how effective these attempts toinstill calm will be and whether the politics of ethnicity can be overcome."Right now, those at the top want peace," says Guei. "But thoseat the bottom are only concerned with revenge."
8分30S

olivia瓜瓜

【越障2-9】
The lessons of philanthropy
Giving for results
There is more to philanthropy—much more—than just giving money away

WHETHER America’s famed philanthropic tradition is all it is cracked up to be will become much clearer during the next few years. Superficially, that tradition has emerged from the global financial crisis in remarkably good shape. In the past year some 69 of America’s billionaires and billionaire families have promised to give away at least half of their fortunes by signing the Giving Pledge championed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the world’s richest men. Among them is 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, proof that America’s giving gene has passed to the next generation.

The question is, will all that giving, by the billionaires and the thousands more Americans with far smaller amounts of money, actually do any good? There is rather a depressing history of well-intentioned donations often doing nothing to alleviate society’s problems, and sometimes even making matters worse. As Mr Buffett has said many times, “making money is far easier than giving it away effectively.” Moreover, the need to give effectively, to maximise the bang for every charitable buck, is about to become even greater, as many of the organisations that receive their funds from private philanthropy or the public sector begin to feel the effects of America’s fiscal problems. Spending cuts will cause a crisis in the social sector that “will have an impact on almost every non-profit [organisation] in America, whether or not it receives government funds,” writes Mario Morino, a veteran philanthropist, in “Leap of Reason”, one of three new books that address the same thorny question of how to not merely give, but to give well.


As evinced by his subtitle, “Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity”, Mr Morino focuses on delivering results, as do the other authors, with their emphasis on smart giving and changing the world. The books draw examples from the many years the authors have spent promoting better philanthropy, and are all worth reading. Only Mr Morino is actually in the process of giving away a fortune he earned for himself, which makes him less prone to wrapping his iron fist in a velvet glove than the other authors, who are all professional philanthrocrats of different kinds. Joel Fleishman raised a fortune for Duke University and ran the American arm of the Atlantic Philanthropies; Thomas Tierney gave up his role as boss of Bain to found Bridgespan, a consulting firm for non-profits; the three authors of “Do More Than Give” work for FSG, another consultancy.

For Mr Buffett, the main reason why giving is harder to do than making money is that in business “you go after the low-hanging fruit”, whereas in philanthropy you are trying to tackle problems that are inherently difficult, such as how to educate demotivated urban kids or end rural poverty. But all three books make the case that the ineffectiveness of much philanthropy is actually the fault of the philanthropist. They applaud the motives for giving, but all make the point that people too often let their philanthropy be guided by their hearts alone. “Deciding what you will do to make change happen is a choice that requires both your head and your heart”, write Messrs Fleishman and Tierney in the best chapter in “Give Smart”, entitled “What Am I Accountable For?” The biggest problem for philanthropists, they argue, may be that “they are essentially accountable to no one but themselves.” To avoid being tempted into a self-deluded belief in their own success, philanthropists should create systems that force them to hear what may at times be unpleasant truths about the ineffectiveness of their work, and to be constantly challenged to improve.


Of the six practices of effective philanthropists described in “Do More Than Give”, two stand out as being unusual. To achieve real change—what the authors, Leslie Crutchfield, John Kania and Mark Kramer, call “catalytic philanthropy”—the best course may be to engage in political advocacy to change government policy, they argue. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing this a lot more than most, on issues ranging from education reform to international aid. But the advice also works at a local level, as the book illustrates through the story of how the Tow Foundation improved juvenile justice policy in Connecticut. Their second sound piece of advice is that philanthropists should work together more often. This seems obvious, but as the authors rightly ask, “Why don’t more foundations actively collaborate with their peers?”


For Mr Morino, a pioneer of “venture philanthropy”, in which the donor works closely to build up the non-profits he supports, one of the key lessons is for philanthropists and non-profits to be clear about the outcomes they are trying to achieve— and to measure properly the progress they are making towards those goals. He is the first to admit that measuring the right thing is not easy, and he has wasted money by measuring the wrong things. Yet far too many philanthropists and non-profits shy away from setting goals and measuring progress. As a result they condemn themselves to ineffectiveness. This must change if philanthropy and the non-profit sector it helps to fund is to achieve the “quantum leap” in effectiveness that he believes is an urgent priority. As he says, “the time to dramatically improve our collective impact is now, when we are needed most.”
5 分48秒，，讲的慈善不仅仅是给予，而是如何有效地给予

olivia瓜瓜

速度2-7

Human-Waste Gold Mine: Bill Gates Looks to Reinvent the Toilet
This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Die Welt.
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft who has morphed into the world's best-known philanthropist, wants to reinvent the toilet.
This next big idea for the good of mankind will now also be getting help from German taxpayers after Development Minister Dirk Niebel earmarked $10 million for a joint project with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Over the next five years, this project aims to provide 800,000 people in Kenya with access to sanitation facilities and ensure clean drinking water for 200,000.
The goal is to find "innovative solutions" for sanitation in poor urban areas. Gates says it's time to move on from the era of the classic toilet. He points out that, despite all the recent achievements, 40% of the world's population, or some 2.5 billion people, still lives without proper means of flushing away excrement. But just giving them Western-style toilets isn't possible because of the world's limited water resources.
The matter is urgent: the lack of sanitary installations and hygienic waste removal furthers the spread of disease. UNICEF estimates that 1.1 billion people worldwide don't have access to any kind of toilet or ways of eliminating waste. That, in turn, fouls drinking water and can cause diarrhea, which spreads quickly.
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According to UNICEF, at least 1.2 million children under the age of 5 die of diarrhea every year; the main cause is contact with human feces. At the end of June, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — together with UNICEF — approved a five-year sustainable sanitation plan under which the number of people who have no access to toilets would be halved by 2015.
Ban emphasized that sanitary installations not only play a decisive role in reducing world poverty, but they are crucial for sustainable development and for making it possible to achieve Millennium Development Goals.
Dutch engineer Frank Rijsberman agrees. He heads the Water, Sanitation & Hygiene department at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and he is presently working on two projects. With one project, the foundation supports the construction of pit latrines in rural areas and slums without sanitation facilities. With the other, it supports research projects, giving grants to scientists who come up with new ideas for using human excrement. He says there have been experiments to turn excrement into a kind of microwave that can be used as a source of energy.
He says there are biological bacteria that could turn waste into compost; he talks about the possibility of toilets actually turning urine into drinking water. Human waste could be a real gold mine, Rijsberman jokes. In view of the world's limited water resources, both the Gates Foundation and German Development Policy support various projects for dry toilets that do not use water to flush and that separate excrement from urine in order to dry it.
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Another method put forward by the Gates Foundation in South Africa is using the urine of 400,000 people to make nitrogenous fertilizer in powder form. A similar albeit high-tech variation is currently being tested by the Society for International Cooperation in Eschborn, Germany. Germany and the Gates Foundation's projects are complementary, says the German Ministry for Development. The importance of this research is not always easy to explain, says Rijsberman, because anything having to do with human waste provokes a "yuck factor."
Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of those concerned are far from convinced that it's a good idea to use toilets in the first place. "We have a lot of work ahead us," says Rijsberman, who knows he can count on his boss's full support.
And the billionaire himself seizes every opportunity to lobby for the end of the traditional Western toilet. In April, Gates met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff in Berlin. In a press conference he told journalists that they didn't talk politics, but discussed the idea of the "ultimate toilet."
From TIME: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2082509,00.html

Pioneering Reporter Helped Change Face of US TV News

For thousands of TV viewers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Davis is a trusted, familiar face on the evening news. But, she recalls, while growing up, there were few black faces on TV.

"When I was a kid at home, we used to yell, 'Come look, come look. There's a colored man on television.' And the whole family would stop and we'd come to get a little glimpse of whoever that person of color was," says Davis. "Well, my goodness, if you did that now, you'd be exhausted by the end of the day."
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Early years
Davis is one of the reasons American television now reflects the racial and ethnic diversity of the country. She grew up in a poor Louisiana family in the 1930s, a place and a time in which segregation and discrimination were rampant.

Things weren’t much different when her family moved west, when Davis was still in school.

"We arrived in California expecting milk and honey, was not at all so," she recalls. "Just being disliked by so many people who didn't like our accents, didn't like our names, just didn't like very much about us because we were so different.”
Challenging times

Davis began her career writing for Jet, a black magazine, before moving on to radio. She remembers the early years as pretty tough.

“All my experience, the majority of it was working in totally segregated media. I could only work at stations that were programmed especially for black people. I could only write for newspapers that were published for a black audience. And no one else would give me even a decent (job) interview for many years."

But Davis persevered. She was among the first to break the color barrier when she was hired by a San Francisco TV station in 1967. As the first woman of color in the newsroom, Davis was seen as an oddball and many of her colleagues thought she wouldn't last.
At that time, Davis says, society at large wasn't ready for a black female TV reporter. She recalls encountering hostility and skepticism.

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Breaking in

"I was working, doing the City Hall beat, and I wasn't allowed in the press room. I couldn't even put a telephone in the press room. And when I was asked to leave news conferences, because they'd say 'This is for reporters.' No one could believe that I was a reporter," she says. "Or a couple of times in hotels, being mistaken for the ironing person or the cleaning person. Those were all parts of growing in the business."
Determined to prove the skeptics wrong, Davis worked long hours and eventually reported on some of the most explosive stories in the headlines; Vietnam war protests, the Al Qaeda bombings in Africa that preceded 9/11 and the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and gay activist Harvey Milk.

In addition to the headline news, Davis sought out stories that would otherwise go untold. In the 70s and 80s, she was among the first in the nation to report on breast cancer, dyslexia and the mysterious new disease that was killing gay men - AIDS.

"The very first live interview with someone diagnosed with AIDS was a guy named Bobbi Campbell. Our technicians didn't understand the disease and it moved so swift and was killing so fast, that there was a lot of hysteria around it," she says.

According to Davis, the technicians refusd to set up the microphone because they didn't want Campbell touching any of the equipment.
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今天状态欠佳，早点休息，好好调整调整。
"It was one of those real demonstrations of women power. They decided that the medical reporter would put the mic on him and the producer would go ahead and crank it up upstairs and we recorded that program and it made history of a sort," she says, "and were rewarded greatly by the fact that some lives were saved because of those early stories."

Today, Davis is still telling important stories. Now in her 70s, she remains active in journalism as host of a weekly current affairs show on public television.
Off the air, she continues to promote the hiring of minorities in the media, and serves as a role model for young journalists who will tell the important stories of the future.

olivia瓜瓜

越障-2-8

The new science of triumph in sports, business, and life.

by Nick SummersJuly 11, 2011

Tony O'Brien / Action Images-ZUMA

Serbia's Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon on June 25.

Andre Agassi Was losing. A lot. After a meteoric start to his professional tennis career, with the best return and fastest reflexes in the game, Agassi had become a chronic underachiever by the early 1990s, dropping early matches and choking in finals alike. And in Key Biscayne, Fla., in March 1994, he was set to lose again—badly—this time to a Pete Sampras who had been nearly incapacitated by food poisoning just moments before the match was to begin.

Frustrated and rudderless, Agassi agreed to have dinner with a prospective new coach, a man whose tennis he didn’t much admire. Brad Gilbert was the anti-Agassi, a moderately talented junker who in his own career had eked out matches he had no right to win. His book about tactics, just published, was titled Winning Ugly. At dinner in Key Biscayne, Agassi wanted an honest assessment of his game. Why did he keep losing to less skilled players?

Gilbert excoriated him for trying to play with perfection. Instead of risking a killer shot on every point, why not keep the ball in play and give the other guy a chance to lose? “It’s all about your head, man,” Gilbert said, as Agassi recalls in his memoir, Open. “With your talent, if you’re fifty percent game-wise, but ninety-five percent head-wise, you’re going to win. But if you’re ninety-five percent game-wise and fifty percent head-wise, you’re going to lose, lose, lose.”

Agassi hired him on the spot. An immediate losing streak ensued, as Gilbert razed and rebuilt his game. But gradually Agassi began to pull out wins in matches that the old Agassi would have lost, and five months later he bulldozed his way to his first U.S. Open championship. “I fall to my knees,” Agassi writes of the moment in Open. “My eyes fill with tears. I look to my box ... You know everything you need to know about people when you see their faces at the moments of your greatest triumph. I’ve believed in Brad’s talent from the beginning, but now, seeing his pure and unrestrained happiness for me, I believe unrestrainedly in him.” At last his head was clear. Symbolically, and seismically, Agassi shaved his iconic glam locks—and punked Sampras in four sets to win his second straight Grand Slam, the 1995 Australian Open, en route to his first career No. 1 ranking. There would be more losses, many more, in his long career. But Andre Agassi had learned how to win.

What is it that separates winners from losers? The pat answer is that, in sports at least, winners simply have certain things that mortals don’t—as one might conclude from watching the suddenly indefatigable Novak Djokovic, the Wimbledon and Australian Open champion, who has lost exactly once in his first 49 matches this year. But fitness doesn’t tell the full story. “There are more players that have the talent to be the best in the world than there are winners,” says Timothy Gallwey, the author of several books about the mental side of tennis, golf, and other pursuits. “One way of looking at it is that winners get in their own way less. They interfere with the raw expression of talent less. And to do that, first they win the war against fear, against doubt, against insecurity—which are no minor victories.”

Defined that way, winning becomes translatable into areas beyond the physical: chess, spelling bees, the corporate world, even combat. You can’t go forever down that road, of course. The breadth of our colloquial definition for winning—the fact that we use the same word for being handed an Oscar as for successfully prosecuting a war—means that there is no single gene for victory across all fields, no cerebral on-off switch that turns also-rans into champions. But neuroscientists, psychologists, and other researchers are beginning to better understand the highly interdisciplinary concept of winning, finding surprising links between brain chemistry, social theory, and even economics, which together give new insight into why some people come out on top again and again.

One area being disrupted relates to dominance, a decent laboratory stand-in for winning. Scientists have long thought that dominance is largely determined by testosterone: the more you have, the more likely you are to prevail, and not just on the playing field. Testosterone is desirable in the boardroom, in the courthouse, and in other scenarios that reward risk and bold action. Twenty-five years ago, scientists proved the hormone’s role in winning streaks: a win gives you a jolt of T, which gives you an edge in your next competition, which gives you more T, and so on, in a virtuous sex-hormone feedback loop.

Last August, though, researchers at the University of Texas and Columbia found that testosterone is helpful only when regulated by small amounts of another hormone called cortisol. What’s more, for those with a lot of cortisol in their blood, high levels of testosterone may actually impede winning.

Across Columbia’s campus, professors at the business school are putting this dominance science into practice, swabbing saliva samples from M.B.A. students to measure both hormones. Each subject is then given a prescription to get the two steroids into ideal balance: eat whole grains and cut out coffee to lower the cortisol; hit the weight room and take vitamin B to raise testosterone. Just before a crucial confrontation, standing in a certain “power pose” can calibrate the hormones temporarily. The ideal leader, says Prof. Paul Ingram, is “calm, but with an urge towards dominance.” (Picture Apple CEO Steve Jobs onstage, unveiling a blockbuster product.) It’s true for both men and women, and in theory it all adds up to winning a contract, winning a promotion, winning the quarter.

New science like this illuminates winners of the past. It’s a peek inside the bloodstream of perhaps the most thrilling competitor to ever eviscerate his opponents at a pensive task: Bobby Fischer, the chess champion. “For Fischer, there was a relentless desire to decimate his opponent,” says Liz Garbus, the director of the new documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World. “Bobby took delight in how he made his opponent ill. There was something of a sadism to the way he approached it.” Before his legendary showdown with Russian archnemesis Boris Spassky in Iceland in 1972, which would determine the world’s No. 1 player, Fischer underwent extensive weight and endurance training; he told a strength coach that he wanted to physically break Spassky’s hand the first time they shook. As the match approached, Fischer hemmed and hawed and would not show up, issuing increasingly bizarre demands and exasperating his foe before play had even begun. “I don’t believe in psychology,” Fischer said of the mind games. “I believe in good moves.”

With the world watching, he did eventually arrive in Reykjavik, and with the match tied 2½ to 2½, Fischer coolly uncorked a move that caught Spassky with his pants down: pawn to c4. Fischer always, always opened with his king’s pawn; it was the only configuration Spassky had prepared for, and in this uncharted territory the Russian was helpless. Fischer’s relentless belligerence had crescendoed to a sublime and understated play, which he followed with further aggression. Spassky never recovered. He managed just one win in the next 15 games, and Fischer and his mind and the testosterone-cortisol cocktail within were No. 1 in the world.

What’s better than winning? Doing it while someone else loses. An economist at the University of Bonn has shown that test subjects who receive a given reward for a task enjoy it significantly more if other subjects fail or do worse—a finding that upends traditional economic theories that absolute reward is a person’s central motivation. It’s one of several new inroads into the social dynamics of winning yielded by neuroeconomics, a trendy new field that mixes elements of neuroscience, economics, and cognitive psychology to determine why people make the choices they do—even, or especially, the irrational ones.

Neuroeconomic studies often involve the dopamine system, a part of the brain that is highly involved with rewards and reward anticipation. Dopamine receptors seem to track possibilities—an arcing tennis ball that may land in or out—and how expected or unexpected they are. For fans, it helps to explain why a win by a No. 1 seed over an unranked challenger is no big deal, while underdog victors like the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team are so electrifying.

A similar kind of expectation management occurs in the minds of athletes themselves, says Scott Huettel, the director of Duke University’s Center for Neuroeconomic Studies. If you ranked an Olympic event’s three medalists by happiness, the athlete winning gold obviously comes first. What’s fascinating, Huettel says, is that the bronze medalist is second-most delighted, and the silver finisher is most distraught. “People’s brains are constantly comparing what happened with what could have happened,” he says. “A bronze medalist might say, ‘Wow, I almost didn’t get a medal. It’s great to be on the stand!’ And the silver medalist is just thinking about all the mistakes he made that prevented him from winning gold.”

All countries love winning, of course. But America, a nation born through victory on the battlefield, has a special relationship with the practice. “When you here, every one of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big-league ballplayers, and the All-American football players,” Gen. George S. Patton once told a gathering of U.S. Army troops in England. “Americans love a winner,” Patton thundered. “Americans will not tolerate a loser.” The next day was June 6, 1944, D-Day, and these were the men who would invade Normandy. We know where that one goes in the win-loss column.

But why do we admire winners—and put so much of our own happiness at stake when watching them compete? At some level of the brain, we think we are the guys in the fray. On Nov. 4, 2008, the night of the most recent presidential election, neuroscientists at Duke and the University of Michigan gave a group of voters some chewing gum. They collected samples at 8 p.m., as the polls closed, and again at 11:30, as Barack Obama was announced the winner. Testosterone levels normally drop around that time of night, but not among Obama supporters—while testosterone plummeted in gum taken from the men who had voted for John McCain.

Vicarious participation, the scientists concluded, mirrors what happens to the principal competitors themselves; the same thing happens in men who watch football and basketball—and, it follows, any other fiercely fought contest, from Andre Agassi’s greatest matches to Bobby Fischer’s run at the Russians. Why do Americans love a winner? Because it lets us love ourselves.
13分钟 。。。。2000字啊啊啊

olivia瓜瓜

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olivia瓜瓜

【速度2-6】


What's So Patriotic About Cookouts?

Plus, what's with all the hamburgers, frankfurters, and wieners? This is America!

By Will OremusPosted Friday, July 1, 2011, at 4:15 PM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2298191/pagenum/all/

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We tend to hold it as a self-evident truth that the proper way to celebrate the country's independence is with a backyard barbecue. The country's leading barbecue trade association reports that the Fourth of July is the nation's most popular outdoor cooking holiday, with Memorial Day a distant second. When did throwing hunks of meat onto an open fire become patriotic?

In the early 1800s. Colonists in Virginia had been getting together in the summer to smoke large animals over a pit since before the nation's founding in a tradition they apparently imported from the West Indies. (The word "barbecue" comes from the Spanish "barbacoa," which is believed to derive from a word used by the indigenous Taino people of Hispaniola to describe a wooden rack used for smoking meats.) The practice spread in the first half of the 19th century as political leaders began staging rallies to mark Independence Day (which was not yet an official holiday); to draw crowds, they held massive barbecues, often roasting whole pigs or even oxen.


The Democratic-Republican Party, which enjoyed strong support in the southern states, found Independence Day cookouts particularly congruent with its ethos. Pushing agrarian virtues and states' rights, party operatives used the rallies to extol the Declaration of Independence and celebrate the barbecue as an expression of regional pride. Elsewhere in the fledgling nation, there are reports of Americans commemorating the occasion with less familiar fare, including turtle soup, which enjoyed popularity in Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston.


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In the 20th century, as the nation's population shifted from the country to the city and then the suburbs, the Independence Day cookout morphed from a public free-for-all into a family affair. Magazine advertisements of the pre-World War II era encouraged families to stage their own "backyard barbecues" with the aid of the newly popularized charcoal grill.


Bonus Explainer: Why do we celebrate America's independence with frankfurters, wieners and hamburgers instead of with meat named after American cities? Because we're a nation of immigrants. And besides, the modern hamburger is far enough removed from its namesake to merit its quintessentially American reputation. According to Josh Ozersky's book The Hamburger: A History, the original "hamburg steak" served to German sailors at food stands along the New York City harbor in the early 19th century was a semi-cured slab of salted and spiced beef. Today's version was made possible by a pair of American innovations: the meat grinder and the hamburger bun. Still, it took a while for the burger to shed its Teutonic connotations. During World War I, diners rebranded their patties as "Salisbury steak" or even "Liberty steaks" to avoid any association with the enemy. But by World War II, Americans had made the meat their own and seemed to have no qualms about the etymology of its name. As for frankfurters, which bear a closer resemblance to their German forerunners: Those with qualms can simply call them hot dogs.




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Scientists Discover Gonorrhea "Superbug"Experts fret that the new strain could spark a global health epidemic.By Stephen Spencer Davis| Posted Monday, Jul. 11, 2011, at 10:53 AM EDT
Some scary news on the STD front.
Scientists have discovered a “superbug” strain of gonorrhea in Japan that is resistant to all antibiotics currently used to fight the sexually transmitted disease, Reuters reports.
Researchers worry that the strain, called H041, could transform the easily treated infection into a global health threat, and say that it has already proven resistant to the only antibiotics that are still effective in treating gonorrhea.
One of the researcher’s who discovered the strain called it both “alarming” and "predictable.”
"Since antibiotics became the standard treatment for gonorrhea in the 1940s, this bacterium has shown a remarkable capacity to develop resistance mechanisms to all drugs introduced to control it," said the researcher, Magnus Unemo.
If left untreated, gonorrhea can lead to ectopic pregnancy and infertility in women.
Unemo sees the strain’s discovery in Japan as part of a larger pattern. "Japan has historically been the place for the first emergence and subsequent global spread of different types of resistance in gonorrhea," he said.
There were indications that gonorrhea could become a superbug last year, when reports emerged from Hong Kong, China, Australia, and other parts of Asia about the disease’s resistance to drugs.
The STD is one of the most common in the world and there are about 700,000 cases annually in the United States alone.
Unemo is slated to present details of his findings at a conference of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research later Monday.



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Tabloid Phone-Hacking Scandal
Could it happen here?

By Jeremy Singer-VinePosted Thursday, July 7, 2011, at 6:09 PM ET

http://www.slate.com/id/2298670/
Rupert Murdoch's son James announced Thursday that News of the World, Britain's top-selling Sunday newspaper, will close as a result of an ongoing phone-hacking scandal. As the Guardian revealed Monday, the paper's reporters illegitimately accessed and deleted messages from a missing girl's voice mail in 2002, one of an estimated 4,000 targets. Could phone-hacking happen here, too?

Yes, though perhaps not quite so easily. "Hacking" is a bit of a misnomer, given how low-tech the infiltrators' methods were: It seems they broke into victims' voice mail inboxes using the carrier's default passcode, such as 1111, taking advantage of the fact that many customers hadn't opted to change it. To do so all they needed to know was the victim's phone number, which if not handy could be obtained by bribing or deceiving customer support representatives. But after phone-hacking incidents surfaced, most if not all U.K. carriers stopped allowing new users to retain default passcodes. And while American wireless carriers are reluctant to talk about specific security protocols, they generally require customers to change their voice mail passcodes from the default immediately or within 30 days of activating the service.

That's not to say we're invulnerable—far from it. At least one of the four largest U.S. wireless carriers, Sprint, says it gives users the option (paired with a stern warning) to skip their password when accessing voice mail from their own phones, a setting that's potentially vulnerable to caller-ID spoofing. (The others—Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA—declined to comment or did not respond to the Explainer's inquiries.) In fact, Paris Hilton was accused in 2006 of doing precisely that to Lindsay Lohan.

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Of course, it's also possible for a wily and unethical reporter to guess a non-default passcode. Because they are restricted to the 10 digits on a phone and typically limited to a certain length, voice mail passcodes are generally easier to crack than website passwords, which may contain letters, numbers, and symbols. Customers tend to choose similar passcodes, and crooks might be able to guess a numerical sequence from the victim's birth date or home address. After a certain number of incorrect guesses, most voice mail systems will hang up or redirect the caller to customer service. It's unclear, however, just how many incorrect guesses these systems tolerate before freezing an account. The Explainer tried 12 incorrect codes on his Verizon voice mail over the span of four calls to no detriment before giving up.

Can you tell if your voice mail has been hacked? Unlikely. Voice mail systems typically allow an infiltrator to re-mark a message as new or delete it without you even knowing. There are, however, potential solutions to the hacking issue. Wireless carriers could, with little technological effort, send you a text message each time someone accesses your voice mail remotely. Or they could use fraud-detection software similar to the systems credit card companies use to stop illegitimate purchases.

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