The first debate among Republican hopefuls for the American presidency takes place in Cleveland, Ohio, this evening. Fox News, the host, has pruned the 17 candidates down to ten for the main event (the rest get some airtime earlier). Those who failed to make the cut include Rick Pery, former governor of Texas. The choice was made by taking an average of five recent polls in which people were asked whom they would vote for. This is the commonest polling question, but it lacks predictive power so early in the contest. More telling is to ask who is likely to win the primary, as a YouGov poll for The Econommist does. The main effect of this change in wording is to relegate self-publicists such as Donald Trump(who leads the standard polls), Mike Hukabee And Ben Carson to promote professional politicians. Take heart, Jeb Bush?
Wolkswagen is searching for a new chairman today, after the resignation on Saturday of Ferdinand Piech-the victim of his own campaign to dispose of the German carmaker’s chief executive, Martin Winterkorn. Mr. Piech rarely picks a fight he can’t win, but he failed to secure backing for his coup from the unions, politicians and other members of the Piech and Porsche families who collectively control the firm. In fact, VW could be better steered. It is the world’s second-largest car company, behind only Toyota, building over 10m cars a year, yet its growth has come at the expense of profit, for which it relies too heavily on its posh Audi brand. It has long failed to replicate its success in the rest of the world in America. But Mr Piech’s isolation forced him to go. Further humiliation awaits if Mr. Winterkorn now replaces him.
Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, son of one president and brother of another, will launch his own presidential bid today. Mr Bush will speak in Miami, his home town and a place before it began. Of all the contenders in the overpopulated Republican field, Mr Bush is the most closely associated with immigration reform, which he thinks the GOP must embrace if it wants to win enough Hispanic votes to find its way to the White House again. To many Republican primary voters, however, this is a defect matched only by the candidate’s surname, which has become associated among activists with the betrayal of the principle that smaller government is always better. Even so, Mr Bush’s record in Florida and his attractiveness to donors put him among the party’s top two or three candidates as this early stage in the race.
20150825Racing to the shops: Foot Locker’s results
Investors will find out if Foot Locker has scored another win today, when it announces results for the three months to the end of July. The trainers and tracksuits retailer has performed well recently, thanks to strong sales of running shoes and high top trainer. But the two biggest trends in retail may be catching up with the company. Foot Locker has failed to capitalize on the rise of “athleisure”, the habit of donning sport clothes with no intention of doing any actual exercise: apparel and accessories accounted for just 21% of its sales last year, and growth has been anaemic. It is also struggling to keep up as shoppers move online. Walmart, which is tackling the problem head on, admitted on Tuesday that investment in digital retail was cutting into profits. Foot Locker’s physical stores account for 88% of its revenue. If more shoppers dash to online competitors, it could be left behind.
scored another win: 又下一城/ the rise of: 崛起anaemic: 有气无力的，出自anemia （贫血）
struggle to keep up: 勉强维系
tackle the problem: 解决问题
head on: 迎面直击/cutting into profits: 削薄利润
20150824Love in the cloud: tech takeover talk
The excitement over a possible takeover of Sales force, a cloud-computing provider built by the larger-than-life Marc Benioff, has died down somewhat. Oracle, one of the likeliest suitors, is apparently not interested; pundits have realized that Mr Benioff’s company, whose price tag is said to be $50 billion, may be too big even for IBM, Microsoft or SAP to buy. But except more tech takeover rumors soon: the recent round of financial results has left some big social –media companies weakened. LinkedIn, Twitter and Yelp all saw their share prices drop by as much as a quarter last week after their figures showed slower growth than expected. Some already regard this as the beginning of the end of the current technology boom (or bubble, arguably). More likely it shows that markets are becoming more discerning, and distinguishing the winners-principally Google and Facebook-from the rest.
1. larger-than-life（形容词），有英雄色彩的
larger-than-life Figure 传奇人物
2. leave no stone unturned千方百计； 想尽办法
14. discerning: 有辨识能力的；眼光敏锐的
15. principally: 主要的，首要的，也可以用mainly 或者 primarily
20150824
Temporal power: North Korea turns back the clock
Tomorrow the people of North Korea already stuck in the past and ruled over by an ancestor-worshipping hereditary dictatorship, will travel back in time. All clocks will be turned back 30 minutes, taking the hermit kingdom into its own time zone and reversing the imposition of Tokyo hours by “wicked Japanese imperialists” in 1912. It’s the latest example of a long tradition of rulers expressing political power through temporal tyranny. What better way to illustrate one’s might than control over time itself? It also lets a country emphasis its independence and non-conformity: in 2007 Venezuela moved to its own time zone, unsullied by imperialist America. It doesn’t always work: the French Revolutionary ten-hour day and the Soviet Union’s six-day week failed to stand the test of time. But for regimes that want to remind their people who is in charge, the urge to fiddle with clocks and calendars is timeless.
Temporal power: 世俗的权力/Hereditary：世袭的
Hermit：隐士/Imposition: 强加
Non-conformity：与众不同/Unsullied：未受玷污的/Regime：政权/Fiddle：拨弄
Experienced Brussels lawyers say they had “never seen anything like it”. Before receiving a copy last week of the European Commission’s antitrust charges against Google, called a “statement of objections”, they had to sign a draconian confidentiality agreement. Nevertheless, within hours details started to leak out. In the next few days more are sure to emerge. In the 120-page document the commission argues that Google abused its dominance in online search (its share exceeds 90% in most of Europe) by diverting web traffic from rival price-comparison services to its own. As a remedy, the commission says that Google must use the “same underlying processes and methods” when showing competing services. Although this sounds simple, implementing such” search neutrality” will be extremely complex. But Google has a big incentive to come up with a solution: if it doesn’t, it could be fined 10% or more than Eur 6 billion ($6.8 billion).
20150812
Vault Disney: the cold never bothered it anyway
Analysts are expecting plenty of smiles when Disney reports second-quarter results today. The slate of films that Disney will release in 2015 is considered one of the strongest in the history of the movie business, and could gross over $2.2 billion, according to Barclays, a bank.” The Avengers: Age of Ultron,” which opened on May 1st, has already enjoyed around $600m in ticket sales globally. The film’s popularity affirms Disney’s strategy of making fewer, high-budget films with well-known intellectual property, much of which was acquired through billion-dollar deals for Pixar(in2006) Marvel(2009) and Lucasfilm(2012). In December Disney will release the first in its new ”Star Wars” trilogy, called “The Force Awakens”, and is expecting galactic ticket sales for that, too. Investors are hoping the force will be with all of them.
America’s Supreme Court hears arguments today in cases which will determine whether gay couples have a constitutional right to marry. The court has previously declined to rule on the subject, leaving states with laws that vary from place to place. The argument for gay marriage rests on interpretations of the 14th Amendment. Introduced after the civil war to protect the rights of ex-salves, the amendment says that states may not” deny to any person within [their] jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”. Those who oppose gay marriage reading of the constitution, which laments the discovery of implied rights of which the document’s authors could scarcely have conceived. The court is finely balanced between the two, but has shown an inclination recently to place limits on the role of government.
Military bombast and selective memory about the second work war fuel Vladimir Putin’s regime. So he will feel right at home when he arrives in Beijing today for a visit that includes China’s celebration on Thursday of the “Victor of the Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and World Anti-Fascist War”. The Chinese leadership will be glad of their guest; few other notables will attend. For its part Russia likes Xi Jinping’s increasingly anti-Western tone. The two countries held their biggest-ever joint military drills last month, featuring “Landing missions” in the Sea of Japan. Behind the showmanship, though, the partnership is hollow. Russia is an economic weakling compared to China, and has deep fears about the future of its thinly populated, resource-rich eastern border provinces. For all the Kremlin’s talk about Asia. Its ties to China dismay others in the region: Japan’s foreign minister has just cancelled a trip to Moscow.
2015-0907 Relying on the Russians: politics and space
The launch of a Russian Soyuz rocket carrying a Dane, a Kazakh and a Russian to the International Space Station, scheduled for o437 GMT today, highlights other nations’ continuing reliance on Russia to ferry people to and from the orbiting outpost-a sore point in American right now. Last month NASA signed a $490m contract with Russia for space-taxi services until 2019. The agency’s boss, Charles Bolden, complained to Congress that America, which retired its Space Shuttle in 2011, was supposed to be back in the manned space-launch business by now, but underfunding has delayed this until 2017 at the earliest. Two companies, Boeing and SpaceX, are developing rockets and vehicles for manned spaceflight, but proposed cuts may cause further delays. Fortunately Russians and Americans continue to get along well in orbit, even though relations have deteriorated on Earth as a result of Vladimir Putin’s meddling in Ukraine.
Kazakh: 哈萨克斯坦人/Schedule for: 定于（日期）
GMT：Greenwich Mean Time 格林威治时间
Highlight: 表明…的重要性/Ferry: 摆渡
Outpost: 前哨/Sore point: 有苦难言之事
Deteriorate: 恶化/Meddle: 干涉
The 124 permanently employed musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the world’s most famous orchestras, will today elect a successor to Sir Simon Rattle, the Briton who has been chief conductor since 2002 and will leave in 2018 when his contract expires. In its self-governing autonomy, the orchestra is unique. That adds suspense to the ballot, which is held in a secrecy that has been compared to papal conclaves. Previous incumbents include musical titans such as Wilhelm Furtwangler, Sergiu Celibidache, Herbert von Karajan and Claudio Abbado. One option mentioned at Berlin dinner parties is Christian Thielemann, a German beloved by aesthetic conservatives. Another is Daniel Bareboim, a piano maestro who is a citizen of Argentina, Israel, Palestine and Spain, and has been adopted by Berlin as its favorite son. But any conductor in the world could get a job, which is why few will have slept well last night.
2015-0906/0517
Signifying (show) nothing (no signs): Britain’s tight election
With ten days to go in Britain’s election campaign, the country’s exhausted politicians must wonder why they bother. The opinion polls have hardly stirred (moved). The Labour Party is slightly ahead of the Conservatives in overall votes, and probably slightly behind in parliamentary seats. A hung parliament looks inevitable (unavoidable); on current form, neither party could make a majority with only one ally. Labour would need the separatist Scottish Nationalists and perhaps the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party. The Tories might well need the DUP, which is open to any offer, and the Liberal Democrats, their current coalition partners though even these outlandish(strange/odd/freakish/
unlikely) combinations might be insufficient. What could break the deadlock(make progress)? The Tories must urgently restore discipline to a campaign that has proved surprisingly distractible and talk relentlessly about the economy. Ed Miliband, Labour’s leader must make more people see him as a prime minister; if he can manage that, he probably will be.
2015-0906 Pride and power: China’s military parade
Today 12,000 troops marched through central Beijin, to celebrate China’s role in the defeat of Japan 70 years ago. Xi Jinping, China’s leader since 2012, is using the occasion partly to assert the country’s right to stand alongside the second world war’s other victors, even though most of its military casualties were sustained under the anti-Communist Kuomintang. He also wants to display China’s growing might: among the weaponry on show was the previously secret Dongfeng (East Wind) 21 D” carrier-killer” missile. Mr Xi surprised observers by announcing he will cut 300,000 troops from the army, which is more than 2m strong. He cast is as a reassurance to the neighbors, though it also illustrates the modernization of China’s armed forces. Amid worries at home and abroad about China’s economy, he may hope that a show of national prowess and efficiency demonstrates his own power and confidence.
celebrate：公开承认一件重要的值得开心的事情。
sustain：遭受。/assert：（坚定地）声明。
casualty: 伤亡人员。/weaponry：武器的集合。
carrier：航空母舰。/reassurance：宽慰。
prowess：专业能力。
2015-0909 毕竟东流去
How low can you go? Best Buy’s results
When Best Buy today reveals its results for the three months to the end of July, investors will learn if the ailing American electronics retailer is smartening up its act. Although it is in a healthier state than many rivals, that is no reason to gloat. Circuit City liquidated in 2009. RadioShack filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Electronics shops have suffered as consumers have abandoned CDs and DVDs; all too often, such stores serve as pricey showrooms for shoppers who examine products in person and they buy online. Best Buy’s year-on-year revenues have fallen or remained flat in each of the past 12 quarters. The company can point to a few successes: its chief executive has trimmed costs, and in August it became the first third-party seller of the Apple Watch. That is promising, but unlikely to reverse the firm’s fortunes.
Ailing adj. 本意：健康有问题的。衍生含义经济不景气
smarten upv. 1. 打扮，整理。
2. smarten up your act (to make more efforts)注意：smart可以表示dress code 的一种，比如smart casual
Gloat 沾沾自喜，幸灾乐祸。/liquidate 清算
2015-0914 金玉败絮
Junked and Jaded: Brazil’s credit downgrade
Standard & Poor’s demotion of Brazil to junk status late on Wednesday was largely priced in. The Sao Paulo stock market fell by just 0.3% yesterday and the real –already down by 30% this year-by 1.8% against the dollar. The rating agency follows the presentation by Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, of a budget for 2016 with a primary deficit (before interest payments). She has tried, unsuccessfully, to pick a path between fiscal orthodoxy, championed by her finance chief, and stimulus, demanded by her planning minister. The government has been quick to insist it will balance the books. But some in the administration, not to mention congressmen who control the 90% of spending that is ring-fenced, may think that the downgrade makes further austerity pointless. Brazail could sink deeper into speculative territory. “I’m in a Confucian phase,” Ms Rousseff told Valor, a newspaper, this week. Confusion, some would say.Junk: 抛弃/Jaded：受够了S&P: 标普指数Demotion: 降级/Be priced in: 被市场所接受Deficit: 赤字Fiscal: 财政的Orthodoxy: 传统观点Austerity: 收紧的财政政策Ring fence: 用作专项的资金
2015-0914 《棘手的美国对华制裁》
Bugbears: American sanctions against Chian
Only days before China’s president, Xi Jinping, arrives in Washtington, American officials are threatening more sanctions against Chinese companies and individuals involved in computer-based espionage. American has tried private warnings, public scolding and sanctions against five named Chinese officials, but the state-sponsored theft of intellectual property (worth$300 billion, official said in 2014) from American companies continues. Chinese hackers have also scooped up personal data relating to millions of American government employees: a boon for Chinese spy masters, and a huge headache for the CIA and other agencies. The Chinese respond that they get hacked, too-not least by American highlights they don’t say that publicly. American highlights a difference: it says its spy agencies don’t help out its big companies, Chinese-style. With little common ground on hacking, and a lack of military-to-military dialogue, not least on digital weapons, which can attack infrastructure, Mr. Xi’s visit is both timely and tricky.
He is nowhere near government. But Jeremy Corbyn’s election on September 12th to lead Britain’s opposition Labour Party is stunning. Even the appointment of some moderate front-bench colleagues will do little to erode the legacy of his decades on the hard left. Like his Venezuelan-style economics (Printing money and state intervention), his foreign policy is starting. He is viscerally anti-American, dislike NATO, wants to scrap Britain’s nuclear weapons, blames the West of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and can see no circumstances in which he would send British troops to fight abroad. He has consorted with terrorist groups including the IRA. Hamas and Hizbullah. He is lukewarm on the European Union, which will not help Mr Cameron fend off Brexit.(Britain Exit from EU) Meanwhile, congratulations are pouring in: from Bernie Sanders in America, Germans nostalgic for the GDR, and Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner. She likes his plan for joint sovereignty over the Falklands-another sure-fire vote-winner.
For 70 years Germans have atoned for the past and yearned to be seen as good. Now the world’s voting with its feet: 413, 000 refugees have arrived in Germany so far in 2015, with 800,000 expected by the year-end, dwarfing other European countries’s hospitality. Though the new arrivals chant “Germany! Germany!!”to speed their passage through reluctant way-stations such as Hungary, the influx frightens xenophobes, who have attacked 340 asylum centres this year (luckily with no deaths). But crowds of Germans are turning out to welcome the refugees. Corporate bosses pledge support, as do celebrities and food ball teams. It feels good that so many people see Germany as a land of hope, Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday. Some of the huddled masses hold up her picture as if she were a new Statue of Liberty. It all gives Germans goose bumps.
Atone:赎罪 (v.), atonement (n.)Dwarf: 把…比下去
Influx: 大量涌入的人潮Xenophobia: 外国人恐惧症；-phobia 后缀是恐惧症的意思。
Pledge: 保证、抵押/Huddled masses:劳苦大众
2015-0915/0805
Books to babysitters: Amazon’s next move
Has Amazon ever seen a market it didn’t want to enter? The internet behemoth started by selling books, before becoming a retailer for everything from art supplies to zombie survival kits. It has branched out into e-readers, cloud computing and tablet computers, and even makes its own nappies. Today it is expected to announce Amazon Home Services, a marketplace to connect customers with nearby plumbers, gardeners and babysitters in several American cities. (Amazon has been testing a version of the service since late 2014.) The company’s willingness to enter unexpected new markets is one of its greatest strengths: it refuses to be constrained by internal or external perceptions of what industry it is in. Some critics worry that it has over-diversified. But Amazon, whose technology chief, Werner Vogels, was recently mocked when he described the firm as “a 20-year-old startup”, is still in land-grab mode-as today’s move demonstrates.
books to babysitter: 押头韵/behemoth: something of monstrous size,
derived from Hebrew for /“beast”。商业巨头/retailer:零售商
zombie survival kits: 僵尸急救包
branch out into: expand into/nappies: diapers (American English)
marketplace:/ the activity of buying and selling products
constrain: limit the development/perception: impression
2015-0915/0806
Amazon at 20: bargains and much, much more
Today Amazon celebrates its website’s 20th birthday. To the giant online retailer, it’s a sales opportunity: it promises subscribers to its Prime shopping service “more deals than Black Friday”. Love or loathe Amazon, it’s changed how people shop and much else. In the 1990s typing your credit-card number into a browser seemed insane; Amazon proved otherwise, sparking what is now a $1.5 trillion global e-commerce market. The Kindle, launched in 2007, popularized e-books, with low prices and instant delivery to the device. Less obviously, Amazon pioneered customer reviews and rating, first of books and then other things. Professional critics were appalled; today everything from hotels to washing machines is rated online. And by renting out server capacity by the hour, Amazon catalyzed cloud computing and powered internet startups from Netflix to Airbnb. Apple may have popularized digital music players, smartphones and tablets, but Amazon has arguably done just as much to shape the digital world.
To promise a service /deal
Love or loathe /To prove otherwise
To spark /To Popularize
To Pioneer/Catalyse
Arguably /Shape the digital world
2015-0916混乱入境
Bordering on chaos: migrants in Europe
Europe’s foreign ministers begin a two-day meeting today that will be dominated by an accelerating migration crisis. With growing numbers of asylum-seekers testing both borders and patience, the European Union looks set to propose a quota system for relocating migrants among member countries far more ambitious than anything previously mooted. Previous efforts have failed thanks largely to opposition from eastern Europeans. Officials from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia will also meet today to discuss their response. Speaking after meeting EU officials in Brussels yesterday, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, reaffirmed his opposition to quotas and defended his decision to build a fence along his country’s border with Serbia. The EU was following a path, he said, that could soon see “tens of millions” of migrants arriving at its borders. Whether or not that is true, Europe must decide what to do with the hundreds of thousands already inside them.
mootv. 建议 (eg. This idea was first mooted as long ago as the 1840s)adj. 悬而未定的 （eg. a moot point）
2015-0916/0517 谷歌新算法
Mobile-geddon: Google’s revised algorithm
The timing is awkward, to say the least. Today Google starts implementing a new version of its algorithm for mobile searches, which will penalize many sites. The overhaul (widely called “mobile-geddon”) comes less than a week after European Union accused the world’s biggest online search firm of systematically favoring its own comparison-shopping service. Google’s change isn’t meant to discriminate against rivals, but to relegate sites not deemed “mobile-friendly” in its search results on smartphones-such as those that load slowly, or are hard to read on a small screen. That may be good news for consumers, who are spending more and more time on smartphones. But it’s also shows how difficult it will be to force Google to treat its own and rival services equally, as the EU wants it to do: Google changes its search algorithm frequently, and there will always be losers and winners.
Algorithm算法, 最早来自阿拉伯数学家 Al Kwarizmi 的名字。 Algebra
Mobilegeddon: 移动端使用友好, mobile friendly。
To say the least: 客气的说。Penalize: 把某人或某物置于不被偏爱的位置。
Overhaul relegate
2015-0917 16Gb 生存指南
How to live with the 16GB iphone’s Pitiful Storage
If you’re considering a new iPhone 6S or 6S Plus, you have three pricing tiers to choose from. If your natural instinct defaults to the cheapest of these, you should be prepared to feel another kind of pinch; at just 16GB of storage, that $200 smartphone will fill up in a hurry. Here’s why, and how to deal. Plenty of digital ink has been spilled lamenting the 16GB iPhone’s very existence, which is fair, because it gives people very little space to work with. It’s worth quickly recapping the issues that encumber Apple’s entry-price device, but not dwelling on them, because life’s too short and it’s not that bad./The most important thing to remember about a 16GB iPhone is that it’s not really 16GB. Or rather, much of that 16GB isn’t actually yours. They’ve been claimed by Apple, both through iOS and preloaded, non-deletable apps like iBooks, Music, Photo Booth, and nearly tow dozen(!) more. We won’t know how much space truly belongs to you until the iPhone 6s ships, but 10GB would be a very generous estimate.
How much room is that in practice? A single graphics-intensive game like Infinity Blade III can take up nearly 2GB on its own, a fifth of your allotted space. A single HD movie, say, Pitch Perfect 2, takes up 5GB, or half of your iPhone’s storage./Even if high-impact games and locally stored media don’t appeal to you, the real killer will be your photo collection. The new iPhone’s 12MP shooter will take beautiful shots, but at larger file sizes than the 8MP iPhone 6 did. It also includes a “Live Photos” feature that’s on by default, turning each of your pics into a space-hogging mini-movie. If none of that deters you from the 16GB iPhone, don’t worry. Listen to my longer episode on how to deal with 16gb…
2015-0917/0525欧盟数字计划
Online, off target: the EU’s digital plan
The European Union may have removed most barriers to physical trade, but online it remains a prime example of provincialism. Digital businesses still have to deal with up to 28 national contract laws, costing them $ 4 billion-8 billion($4.5 billion-9 billion) annually. To change this, the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, will today adopt a plan to create a digital single market. Most of its proposals would improve matters: for instance, by harmonizing rules for online purchases and the allocation of radio spectrum. But the commission also wants to start a “comprehensive assessment of the role of platform”, the digital services that dominate the internet, notably Facebook and Google. Critics worry that that is only a first step towards creating a powerful new regulator. Google is already the subject of antitrust proceedings in Brussels; such a body would make formal oversight of the American search giant permanent.
1 provincialism：地方主义。/2 harmonise：使之和谐。
4 comprehensive：全面的。/5 assessment：评估
8 spectrum：频谱。/9 proceeding：继续审理。
10 giant：巨人、巨头
2015-0918 911阴魂不散
Fourteen years on: sickness and 9/11
Marcy Borders died last month from stomach cancer. A photograph of her, coated in dust, during the attacks of September 11th 2oo1 became an enduring image of that terrible morning. Her death was a grim reminder that not all the victims died on the day. When the twin towers collapsed, they spewed a deadly mix of carcinogens. Thousands were exposed; many are now ill. Some of the programmers paid for by the $4.3 billion James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which provides health care and compensation for the sick, will start to expire in October unless Congress extends the bill. Some 70,000 people, including first responders, recovery workers and survivors, receive treatment. Many have more than one illness. Coalminers with black lung receive federal help indefinitely. Some are calling for the same for September 11th’s sick.
black lung：尘肺病的别称，也称作CWP， coal worker's pneumoconiosis。/carcinogens：致癌物。
enduring：持续的。/expire：过期；呼气；死亡。
indefinitely：无限期的。/grim：阴森恐怖。
spew：喷出。/coated：覆盖住。
2015-0918/0812 欧盟对谷歌提出反垄断指控
In search of neutrality: Google and the EU
Experienced Brussels lawyers say they had “never seen anything like it”. Before receiving a copy last week of the European Commission’s antitrust charges against Google, called a “statement of objections”, they had to sign a draconian confidentiality agreement. Nevertheless, within hours details started to leak out. In the next few days more are sure to emerge. In the 120-page document the commission argues that Google abused its dominance in online search (its share exceeds 90% in most of Europe) by diverting web traffic from rival price-comparison services to its own. As a remedy, the commission says that Google must use the “same underlying processes and methods” when showing competing services. Although this sounds simple, implementing such” search neutrality” will be extremely complex. But Google has a big incentive to come up with a solution: if it doesn’t, it could be fined 10% or more than Eur 6 billion ($6.8 billion).
2015-0921 噎死你
Chokepoint: South-East Asia’s haze returns
Many people in Malaysia, Singapore and parts of Indonesia will begin their day by checking an air-quality index. The “haze” is back. Industrial –scale slash and burn agriculture, often for palm oil plantations on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, is smothering the region in smoky pollution. The fires are being fought with water-bombing helicopters, cloud seeding aero planes and hundreds of soldiers. Sumatra itself is worst-affected. But in Malaysia too, some schools have had to shut. Singapore’s air-quality index has for days strayed into the “unhealthy” range. The haze first emerged as a man-made catastrophe in 1997 when it caused massive disruption and untold damage to human health. In Singapore anger is mounting at the Indonesian incompetence and corruption that make it an annual event. Indonesia’s vice-president, Jusuf Kalla, has not helped, by castigating Singaporeans for complaining, rather than celebrating the 11 months a year when they enjoy “nice air from Indonesia”.
Choke窒息Smother: 窒息Stray偏离正道Untold：不可计量的Mount: 增加Castigate：批评
2015-0921/0710 公路旅行
Freedom and the open road: a July 4th ritual
Falling fuel prices are reintroducing many Americans to a cherished Independence Day tradition: sitting in a traffic jam. Despite reports that car culture is in decline, it seems that if filling up is cheap enough, the country still loves a road trip. This July 4th the national average price of a gallon of petrol (gasoline) is $2.77, almost a dollar less than a year ago, and the lowest on this date since 2010. The American Automobile Association reckons about 35.5 m Americans will travel by car over the holiday, and reports that monthly petrol demand has risen by 4.5% since June 2014. The Federal Highway Administration, meanwhile, reports that total vehicle miles travelled have risen for 14 consecutive months. Americans drove nearly a trillion miles in the first four months of 2015-a new record.
Europeans can only gape in disbelief: British drivers, for comparison, pay the equivalent of $7 a gallon.
1 ritual：仪式/2 reintroduce：重新介绍
4 be in decline：每况日下5 gallon：加仑（3.79升）8 reckon：经过计算之后得出总结9 consecutive：连续
10 gape：瞠目结舌的瞪着
Form and content: the Republican debate
The first debate among Republican hopefuls for the American presidency takes place in Cleveland, Ohio, this evening. Fox News, the host, has pruned the 17 candidates down to ten for the main event (the rest get some airtime earlier). Those who failed to make the cut include Rick Pery, former governor of Texas. The choice was made by taking an average of five recent polls in which people were asked whom they would vote for. This is the commonest polling question, but it lacks predictive power so early in the contest. More telling is to ask who is likely to win the primary, as a YouGov poll for The Econommist does. The main effect of this change in wording is to relegate self-publicists such as Donald Trump(who leads the standard polls), Mike Hukabee And Ben Carson to promote professional politicians. Take heart, Jeb Bush?