阅读小结：学习一些旅游知识。

———————————————————————————————————————————————

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/07/14/common.travel.mistakes/index.html

Tourists enjoy the beach on Phi Phi Island, Thailand.

(CNN) -- To some it's a vacation, to others it's a holiday. No matter what you call it, it's a time to relax.

But with packed summer flights, ever-tightening budgets and scammers pulling fast ones on unsuspecting travelers, it's easy to make mistakes that could turn your hard-earned vacation into a nightmare. Before you go leaving on a jet plane here are some simple tips to insure happy trails.

Internet finds deals, troubles. The old adage "if it looks too good to be true, it probably is" still applies, even in the Caribbean.

Before you hand over your credit card for that inexpensive travel package, do your homework and find out exactly what's included, advises Linda Allen, cruise specialist for Cruises by Linda in Harrison, Arkansas. Also consider the destination's climate and seasonal variations.

"The cheapest time to go to the Caribbean is in the middle of hurricane season," Allen said. She also sees people trying to cram four people into rooms as small as 120 square feet which she compares to "a Boy Scout tent."

Ensuring your insurance. While you might have no qualms about hiking Mt. Everest, your health insurers might see things differently. In many cases, your medical insurance doesn't extend to international destinations. Check your coverage before you go.

Doug Stallings, senior editor for Fodor's Travel and Fodors.com, said travelers must remember that being injured abroad can bring about hefty out-of-pocket expenses, even when you are covered.

"The one thing people need to understand if you are injured abroad is you will have to pay for your medical care, even hospital care, but then be reimbursed by [your] insurance," Stallings said.

If your insurance doesn't cover you abroad, you might want to purchase travel insurance which can cost less than $10 for a week-long trip.

Save your skin. The first day of vacation should be spent scoping out your new surroundings and not finding aloe vera to tend to your newly burned skin, so don't just pack sun screen but use it properly. Travelers often apply sunscreen once in the morning and neglect to re-apply throughout the day, according to travel health expert Dr. Phyllis Kozarsky. Follow the directions closely and keep applying it when you get out of the pool or sweat excessively.

The same applies to insect repellant. Insects can be more than just pests, Kozarsky said. They can also carry and transmit diseases like West Nile virus and malaria.

Also, make sure you're up to date on immunizations and research recommended vaccinations if you're heading to an exotic locale.

Dr. Kozarsky recommends checking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Traveler's Health Web site for specific health information for destinations and the International Society of Travel Medicine at istm.org to find a travel health doctor.

Pack your common sense. Don't check your common sense with your bags. Kozarsky sees travelers letting their guard down and participating in reckless behavior like driving erratically.

"If you wouldn't do it here, why there?" she said. "People think things not OK here are OK on vacation."

She also sees a rise in sexually transmitted diseases when travelers return and reminds people to practice safe sex and to pack condoms.

Stay safe. While you don't need to wear a bullet proof vest and padlock your fanny pack, you should remain vigilant, says Robert Reid, the United States travel editor for Lonely Planet. He recalled the first day of a trip to Guadalajara, Mexico, when a stranger distracted him while he was waiting at a bus stop while another took his belongings, including his passport.

Always pack photocopies of your passport and another government-issued identification (i.e. driver's license) in different places. If your identification is stolen or lost, the copies can be presented at the nearest embassy or consulate and sometimes replaced as soon as later that day, Stallings said.

Stallings recommends keeping on hand the State Department's American Citizens Services and Crisis Management (ACS) number (202/ 647-5225), which aids travelers in natural disasters, receiving money and replacing passports.

Minimize flight fiascos. Missing your flight and hopping on one an hour later is one thing, but what if that's the only flight for the week? That's what happened to Reid's wife. He was planning to meet her at the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia but a delay caused her to miss the once-weekly Anchorage to Kamchatka flight. Ultimately, she arrived in the mountainous region, after backtracking to connect in New York City and Moscow.

Reid recommends double checking your flight itinerary to insure you get to your final destination without hassle.

"These little things can happen if you are flying a lot of different flights that aren't hooked up on the same airline and if you are going to far-away countries," Reid said. "Plan things a little more carefully."

Manage your money. Losing money or having your money stolen definitely ruins a vacation. Stallings recommends keeping account numbers and company contact information in your carry-on luggage to make replacing them easier should they get lost or stolen. If you lose your money, have a friend wire you money via a money transfer service like Western Union to a consulate.

阅读小结：大自然的惩罚，是天灾，还是人祸？

———————————————————————————————————————————————

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/world/middleeast/14euphrates.html?ref=world

A boy rested on the mud in a dried-up section of the Euphrates River near Jubaish, Iraq, in June.

JUBAISH, Iraq — Throughout the marshes, the reed gatherers, standing on land they once floated over, cry out to visitors in a passing boat.

“Maaku mai!” they shout, holding up their rusty sickles. “There is no water!”

The Euphrates is drying up. Strangled by the water policies of Iraq’s neighbors, Turkey and Syria; a two-year drought; and years of misuse by Iraq and its farmers, the river is significantly smaller than it was just a few years ago. Some officials worry that it could soon be half of what it is now.

The shrinking of the Euphrates, a river so crucial to the birth of civilization that the Book of Revelation prophesied its drying up as a sign of the end times, has decimated farms along its banks, has left fishermen impoverished and has depleted riverside towns as farmers flee to the cities looking for work.

The poor suffer more acutely, but all strata of society are feeling the effects: sheiks, diplomats and even members of Parliament who retreat to their farms after weeks in Baghdad.

Along the river, rice and wheat fields have turned to baked dirt. Canals have dwindled to shallow streams, and fishing boats sit on dry land. Pumps meant to feed water treatment plants dangle pointlessly over brown puddles.

“The old men say it’s the worst they remember,” said Sayid Diyia, 34, a fisherman in Hindiya, sitting in a riverside cafe full of his idle colleagues. “I’m depending on God’s blessings.”

The drought is widespread in Iraq. The area sown with wheat and barley in the rain-fed north is down roughly 95 percent from the usual, and the date palm and citrus orchards of the east are parched. For two years rainfall has been far below normal, leaving the reservoirs dry, and American officials predict that wheat and barley output will be a little over half of what it was two years ago.

It is a crisis that threatens the roots of Iraq’s identity, not only as the land between two rivers but as a nation that was once the largest exporter of dates in the world, that once supplied German beer with barley and that takes patriotic pride in its expensive Anbar rice.

Now Iraq is importing more and more grain. Farmers along the Euphrates say, with anger and despair, that they may have to abandon Anbar rice for cheaper varieties.

Droughts are not rare in Iraq, though officials say they have been more frequent in recent years. But drought is only part of what is choking the Euphrates and its larger, healthier twin, the Tigris.

The most frequently cited culprits are the Turkish and Syrian governments. Iraq has plenty of water, but it is a downstream country. There are at least seven dams on the Euphrates in Turkey and Syria, according to Iraqi water officials, and with no treaties or agreements, the Iraqi government is reduced to begging its neighbors for water.

At a conference in Baghdad — where participants drank bottled water from Saudi Arabia, a country with a fraction of Iraq’s fresh water — officials spoke of disaster.

“We have a real thirst in Iraq,” said Ali Baban, the minister of planning. “Our agriculture is going to die, our cities are going to wilt, and no state can keep quiet in such a situation.”

Recently, the Water Ministry announced that Turkey had doubled the water flow into the Euphrates, salvaging the planting phase of the rice season in some areas.

That move increased water flow to about 60 percent of its average, just enough to cover half of the irrigation requirements for the summer rice season. Though Turkey has agreed to keep this up and even increase it, there is no commitment binding the country to do so.

With the Euphrates showing few signs of increasing health, bitterness over Iraq’s water threatens to be a source of tension for months or even years to come between Iraq and its neighbors. Many American, Turkish and even Iraqi officials, disregarding the accusations as election-year posturing, say the real problem lies in Iraq’s own deplorable water management policies.

“There used to be water everywhere,” said Abduredha Joda, 40, sitting in his reed hut on a dry, rocky plot of land outside Karbala. Mr. Joda, who describes his dire circumstances with a tired smile, grew up near Basra but fled to Baghdad when Saddam Hussein drained the great marshes of southern Iraq in retaliation for the 1991 Shiite uprising. He came to Karbala in 2004 to fish and raise water buffaloes in the lush wetlands there that remind him of his home.

“This year it’s just a desert,” he said.

Along the river, there is no shortage of resentment at the Turks and Syrians. But there is also resentment at the Americans, Kurds, Iranians and the Iraqi government, all of whom are blamed. Scarcity makes foes of everyone.

The Sunni areas upriver seem to have enough water, Mr. Joda observed, a comment heavy with implication.

Officials say nothing will improve if Iraq does not seriously address its own water policies and its history of flawed water management. Leaky canals and wasteful irrigation practices squander the water, and poor drainage leaves fields so salty from evaporated water that women and children dredge huge white mounds from sitting pools of runoff.

On a scorching morning in Diwaniya, Bashia Mohammed, 60, was working in a drainage pool by the highway gathering salt, her family’s only source of income now that its rice farm has dried up. But the dead farm was not the real crisis.

“There’s no water in the river that we drink from,” she said, referring to a channel that flows from the Euphrates. “It’s now totally dry, and it contains sewage water. They dig wells but sometimes the water just cuts out and we have to drink from the river. All my kids are sick because of the water.”

In the southeast, where the Euphrates nears the end of its 1,730-mile journey and mingles with the less salty waters of the Tigris before emptying into the Persian Gulf, the situation is grave. The marshes there that were intentionally reflooded in 2003, rescuing the ancient culture of the marsh Arabs, are drying up again. Sheep graze on land in the middle of the river.

The farmers, reed gatherers and buffalo herders keep working, but they say they cannot continue if the water stays like this.

“Next winter will be the final chance,” said Hashem Hilead Shehi, a 73-year-old farmer who lives in a bone-dry village west of the marshes. “If we are not able to plant, then all of the families will leave.”

阅读小结：不看不知道，和BBC一比，CNN那种报道根本不能称之为新闻。怪不得沙龙的双语新闻大多选自BBC。

第二遍：2009年07月14日 星期二 21:00

———————————————————————————————————————————————

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8149061.stm

China has extended its investigations into alleged spying and bribery by Rio Tinto employees to executives of five Chinese steelmakers.

Baosteel Group, Anshan Iron & Steel Group, Laigang Group and Jigang Group are being probed, the China Daily said.

An executive at another major producer, Shougang Group, was detained last week, news reports said.

Australian Rio worker, Stern Hu, and three of the firm's other employees were detained in China last week.

The men are accused of stealing state secrets and have faced accusations of bribery.

Scrapped deal

Mr Hu's arrest has created a political and diplomatic problem for Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who has made improving relations with Beijing a priority.

Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan has said the case of Mr Hu should be handled quickly.

Analysts say it has also cast a shadow over resource-rich Australia's trading relationship with China, which was worth $58bn in 2008.

In June, Rio scrapped a $19.5bn (£12.1bn) deal with China's state-owned Chinalco in favour of a tie-up with rival giant BHP Billiton, which angered some in Beijing.

Negotiations

Baosteel, Shougang and Angang are among the 16 delegation members at the talks for fixing 2009 iron ore prices, the China Daily reported.

It said the annual talks, which were supposed to conclude by 30 June, were continuing despite the arrests and investigations.

Rio Tinto was acting as lead negotiator for global iron ore producers in talks with Chinese mills on the price for annual supply contracts.

The Rio employees are accused of bribing Chinese steel company personnel to obtain summaries of the negotiators' meetings, according to Chinese news reports.

In Canberra, Australia, the Chinese ambassador was again called in to the foreign ministry on Tuesday, the third summons in a week.

Australia's opposition is pressing for more aggressive action on Mr Hu's arrest, but Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner said "yelling and screaming" would not help.

阅读小结：新闻图片一共有8张，太多了，只贴第一张。

———————————————————————————————————————————————

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE5690JO20090710?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

General Motors Company President and CEO Fritz Henderson pauses before speaking with the media during a news conference at the GM headquarters in Detroit, Michigan July 10, 2009.

DETROIT (Reuters) - A new General Motors emerged from bankruptcy protection on Friday -- far more quickly than most industry watchers had expected -- as a leaner automaker pledging to win back American consumers and pay back taxpayers.

A whirlwind 40-day bankruptcy for GM concluded with the closing of a deal that sold key operations to a new company majority-owned by the U.S. Treasury.

The development, which follows a similar fast-track reorganization of Chrysler, represented a victory for the Obama administration and its commitment to save jobs and prevent a liquidation of the largest U.S. automaker.

At the same time, the U.S. government has taken on substantial new risks as a 60 percent owner of the new GM with a $50 billion equity investment and $10 billion in debt and perpetual preferred shares.

Analysts said the government intervention had given GM a new chance and sharply lower operating costs, but left management facing deep challenges given the weak economy and GM's long-running slide in market share.

"I wouldn't really call it a new GM, it is just a smaller GM. That would be more of an apt description. They still have a lot of hurdles to jump," said Mirko Mikelic, portfolio manager at Fifth Third Bank. "Right now, they are in a survival mode."

Chief Executive Fritz Henderson said the new company would shed layers of management, make decisions faster and shed the bureaucracy that critics say contributed to the failure of the 100-year-old automaker.

The company's white-collar workforce will be cut by more than 20 percent by eliminating 6,000 jobs. Executive ranks will be cut 35 percent.

NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL

"The bottom line is that business as usual -- and as we have had it until today -- is over," Henderson told reporters at GM's Detroit headquarters. "Everyone associated with GM must be prepared to change -- and fast."

Bankruptcy slashed GM's debt and healthcare obligations and brought down labor costs to be on par with Japanese competitors led by Toyota Motor Corp.

The new GM will have slashed its debt and healthcare obligations by $48 billion, dropped almost 40 percent of the dealers from an unprofitable network and moved to sell laggard brands such as Saab, Saturn and Hummer.

Analysts said that gives GM a chance to deliver on its commitment to launch more fuel-efficient cars and to focus its resources on fewer brands, models and dealerships.

"The challenge in the future is how to approach a marketplace that has been burned by GM," said Pete Hastings, a fixed-income analyst at Morgan Keegan.

While key assets and the Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and GMC brands were sold out of bankruptcy to form the new General Motors Company, other assets, including shuttered factories, remain in bankruptcy for a liquidation process.

That old GM, which will become Motors Liquidation Co, is expected to stay in bankruptcy for years.

Bondholders, who had been owed $27 billion, could eventually receive a 10 percent stake in the new GM.

The U.S. Treasury will own 60.8 percent and 11.7 percent will be owned by the governments of Canada and Ontario. A retiree trust fund affiliated with the United Auto Workers union will hold 17.5 percent.

GM will start to pay back its debt to the U.S. Treasury, which it owes by 2015, as soon as possible, Chief Financial Officer Ray Young told Reuters Television in an interview.

The automaker plans an initial public offering as soon as 2010 and could use some of the proceeds from that stock sale to repay government debt, Young said.

NEW GM, NEW CULTURE?

Henderson, who took over as CEO when predecessor Rick Wagoner was ousted by the Obama administration at the end of March, said the company would be run by a single executive committee, cutting the number of top decision-makers in half.

He also said key decision-makers would meet weekly, a practice adopted by Ford Motor Co CEO Alan Mulally that he has credited with speeding that automaker's turnaround.

GM also eliminated the North American executive team overseeing operations in its troubled home market, which had caused the automaker to lose more than $80 billion since 2005.

Nick Reilly, who has headed Asian operations, will take control of GM's international operations based in Shanghai, a recognition of the growing importance of China at a time when GM is selling its European unit, Opel.

Bob Lutz, 77, GM's outspoken and high-profile former product chief, agreed to stay in a new position with responsibility for marketing, communications and a continued role in vehicle design.

Barclays Capital analyst Brian Johnson said Henderson's maneuvers in part dismantled organizational forms that were a hallmark of Wagoner's tenure.

"The organizational steps GM announced are, in the context of the GM culture, relatively significant, even as they appear inscrutable to outsiders," Johnson said.

GM's exit from bankruptcy in 40 days followed a path blazed by Chrysler that culminated in an asset sale that gave control of the smaller automaker to Italy's Fiat SpA.

Ford has avoided seeking emergency U.S. government loans. Ford shares closed up 1.6 percent at $5.72 on Friday. The stock has nearly tripled since hitting a low in early February.

(Reporting by Kevin Krolicki; additional reporting by Caroline Humer and Jui Chakravorty Das; editing by Patrick Fitzgibbons, Lisa Von Ahn and Matthew Lewis)

阅读小结：CNN的时事报道看多了都是一个味。

———————————————————————————————————————————————

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/07/09/china.riotinto.arrested/index.html

File photo of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on a 2006 tour of a Rio Tinto plant in Western Australia.