2016年3月31日 星期四

bust (ARREST), partake, pathbreaking, capital calls, breaking news/Breakingviews, CCTV for marching orders





From the Fringe 15.10.2007

Bus Driver Sacked After Toilet Paper "Theft"

The health and safety of both the driver of a bus and the passengers must be the priority of all transport companies. However, one firm may have put both at risk in an unprecedented crackdown of diarrhea sufferers.

Germany continues to debate whether increased numbers of security cameras will help reduce the risk of terror attacks.

The German Interior Ministry is particularly keen on rolling out more surveillance systems and while there is a certain amount of concern among civil liberty groups and a percentage of the population, many Germans equate more security with more protection and seem to have few problems with the idea.

One section of the population who may start to have a problem with more CCTV is the nation's bus drivers. While a strategically placed camera may be used to identify a person of specific threat from ending hundreds of people's lives, a single device can also be used to ruin just one person's life and put his career on the skids.

Stomach cramps lead to employment pain
This is exactly what happened to German bus driver Jochen Lorenz. The 58-year-old driver from the central town of Ilmenau -- with no known affiliations with any terrorist group -- was sacked after being spotted taking a roll of toilet paper from the bus depot lavatory.

An Israeli plumber checks a toilet in a Tel Aviv bomb shelterBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Some thought the security measures went too far
Lorenz had arrived at work for his shift at 5:30 a.m., feeling a little under the weather with stomach cramps. He made an emergency visit to the loo shortly before taking his seat at the helm of his bus and, fearing he may be caught short on the route, took a roll from the cubicle just in case.

"I was feeling ill when I arrived at the bus depot. Stomach problems," Lorenz told the Bild Zeitung newspaper. "So I went to the lavatory. Things didn't get better so I took a roll of toilet paper and put it in the bus. I wanted to have some during the drive in case of an emergency."

Bus driver unaware of strict paper controls
The eye-in-the-sky, however, did not look favorably on this. The surveillance cameras had been installed by the powers that be to monitor strict control of toilet paper usage, among other things. This fact, unbeknownst to Lorenz at the time, was made glaringly and painfully obvious when he received his marching orders.

Rock fans with toilet paper  at the Wacken Open Air Rock FestivalBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Germans showed their solidarity for the sacked driver
The letter of dismissal stated that the quantity of toilet paper was strictly monitored and that a fresh roll of paper had disappeared.
“After the surveillance data was analyzed, it was found that you, Herr Lorenz, were the only user to use the facilities, at 05:49 hours," the letter from the bus company said.

Lorenz protested against the sacking and told his boss that the roll was still in the bus, but to no avail. So Lorenz took the company to court and managed to secure a pay-off settlement totaling €7,500 ($10,625).
DW staff (nda)




China’s Latest Crackdown: The Liquid Lunch
By JIM YARDLEY 5:14 PM ET
A Communist Party campaign aims to bust civil servants partaking in booze-soaked lunches.



German Cops Bust Italian With Cocaine Sandwich

One of the main ingredients of bread, as most people know, is flour, so
Frankfurt police weren't immediately suspicious when they stopped a driver
transporting a ciabatta. But this bread contained another sort of powder.

The DW-WORLD Article
http://newsletter.dw-world.de/re?l=evyouyI44va89pI2



to fund capital calls


By lending to its own employees to fund capital calls, Goldman Sachs is risking "TARP rage" -- the special wrath that taxpayers and lawmakers reserve for potentially questionable actions by those that receive money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Breakingviews says.



Breakingviews: Foxconn’s Deal to Buy Sharp Is a Test for Japanese Reform


魏國金
The exhibit at the Rijksmuseum, originally gifted to Willem Drees in 1969 by then US ambassador William Middendorf as a souvenir of a pathbreaking trip by three US astronauts on July 20, 1969.

這塊陳列於國立博物館的展品,原本是由當時的美國大使威廉.米登道夫於1969年,當作是同年7月20日3名美國太空人率先登月的紀念品,贈送給威廉.德瑞斯。 (此姓氏翻譯可能有問題 EE 讀 E")

breaking news

NOUN

[MASS NOUN]
Newly received information about an event that is currently occurring or developing:some breaking news now of a rescue situation in Californiathe announcement will likely be the lead story for the broadcastbarring other major breaking news


closed-circuit television (¦klōzd ¦sər·kət ′tel·ə′vizh·ən) (communications)
Any application of television that does not involve broadcasting for public viewing; the programs can be seen only on specified receivers connected to the television camera by circuits, which include microwave relays and coaxial cables. Abbreviated CCTV.


pathbreaking︰形容詞,開路先鋒的、開創性的。例如︰pathbreaking scientific discoveries(開創性的科學發現。)

adj.
Characterized by originality and innovation; pioneering.


capital calls
Requests for additional money required of investors to fund a deficit. A corporate stockholder has no legal obligation to meet a capital call.


cop was found in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary at the entries listed below.


bust (ARREST) Show phonetics
verb [T] bust or US bustedbust or US busted SLANG
When the police bust a person they arrest him or her, or when they bust a building or a place they arrest people in it who they believe are breaking the law:
The police busted him because they think he's involved with a terrorist group.

bust Show phonetics
noun [C] SLANG
an occasion when police arrest people who are thought to have broken the law:

In their latest drugs bust police entered a warehouse where cocaine dealers were meeting.





bust noun [C] SLANG
an occasion when police arrest people who are thought to have broken the law:
In their latest drugs bust police entered a warehouse where cocaine dealers were meeting.


━━ v., n. 〔話〕 =burst; 〔話〕 破産[失敗](する[させる]); 【軍】降格する; こわす; 破裂させる; なぐる; 馴らす; 〔米俗〕 逮捕[手入れ](する) ((for)); 〔話〕 どんちゃん騒ぎ; 不景気, 不況; 〔話〕 殴打.
bust out 〔米〕 一斉に開花する; 〔俗〕 脱走する ((of)).
bust up 〔俗〕 けんかする; 〔米〕 破損する; 〔米〕 別れる.━━ a. 〔話〕 壊れた; 破産した.
bust・er ━━ n. 〔話〕 こわす人[もの], 暴風; 〔俗〕 すごい人[子]; 〔俗〕 (時にB-) ((呼びかけ)) 小僧, にいさん, 君; =baby buster.
bust-up 〔英〕 けんか; 離婚, 解散.


partake (EAT/DRINK) Show phonetics
verb [I] partook, partaken OLD-FASHIONED OR HUMOROUS
to eat or drink:
Would you care to partake of a little wine with us?

booze Show phonetics 即上文的 liquid
noun [U] INFORMALalcohol:
The party's at Kate's on Friday night - bring some booze.




on skid row MAINLY US INFORMAL
poor, without a job or a place to live, and often drinking too much alcoholmarching orders plural noun (US USUALLY walking papers) INFORMAL
If you give someone their marching orders, you ask them to leave a place or a job because they have done something wrong:
Three players got their marching orders last week.
She was called into the boss's office and given her marching orders

chomping their way through, cigar-chomping

Scientists first raised the alarm 50 years ago about crown-of-thorns starfish chomping their way through the Great Barrier Reef. In 2015 we reported that divers were injecting starfish with a solution made of salts from cattle-bile. It killed more than 300,000 starfish in its first year of use. Unfortunately, that is only a fraction of the tens of millions thought to infest the entire reef

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY
Amazon's Kindle 2 Improves the Good, Leaves Out the Bad
Amazon's electronic book reader Kindle 2 fixes the worst design flaws while maintaining the excellent book-buying experience of its predecessor.


DealBook took a look at Mr. Schwartz, a polished investment banker who helped build the firm's corporate finance unit in the 1980s -- and represents a stylistic change from his cigar-chomping predecessor.

chomp
verb [I or T] (ALSO champ) INFORMAL
to chew food noisily:
He was chomping away on a bar of chocolate.
There she sat, happily chomping her breakfast.

pre・de・ces・sor



-->
━━ n. 前任者; 先輩; 先祖; 前の物.


to turn supergrass, Big Brother, index card



If you're looking to get your finances in order this year, ‪#‎UChicago‬prof. Harold Pollack has you covered—he's created one index card "with all the financial advice you’ll ever need."
(Pollack shares more financial tips in his new book The Index Card, out next week.)



Pollack said he thought that the correct basic financial advice for most…
MAG.UCHICAGO.EDU



An index card (or system card in Australian English) consists of heavy paper cut to a standard size, used for recording and storing small amounts of discrete data. It was invented by Carl Linnaeus,[1] around 1760.[2]


An index card in a library card catalog. Type of cataloging has mostly been supplanted by computerization.

Big Brother noun [S] big brother 兄; (普通B- B-) 独裁者.
a government, ruler or person in authority that has complete power and tries to control people's behaviour and thoughts, and limit their freedom




Google as friend, or Big Brother

John Arlidge visits the Googleplex to hear about the company's plans for world domination
October 21, 2007 12:50 PM

The Sunday Times Magazine has a huge piece on Google. Who's looking at you?, by former Observer (etc) regular John Arlidge, who visited the Googleplex like a good travel writer. It shows how the behemoth looks to someone who isn't a tech specialist, which is to say, scarily like some sort of Big Brother operation that wants to plant chips in our brains and track us everywhere:

Google's overall goal is to have a record of every e-mail we have ever written, every contact whose details we have recorded, every file we have created, every picture we have taken and saved, every appointment we have made, every website we have visited, every search query we have typed into its home page, every ad we have clicked on, and everything we have bought online. It wants to know and record where we have been and, thanks to our search history of airlines, car-hire firms and MapQuest [sic: he means Google Maps], where we are going in the future and when.



But don't worry, it's all for your own good:

Brin and Page were obsessed with recording, categorising and indexing anything and everything, and then making it available to anyone with internet access because they genuinely believed -- and still do -- that it is a morally good thing to do. It may sound hopelessly hippie-ish and wildly hypocritical coming from a couple of guys worth £10 billion each, but Brin and Page insist they are not, and never have been, in it for the money. They see themselves as latter-day explorers, mapping human knowledge so that others can find trade routes in the new information economy.



Sadly, if you read the story online, the Times Online's Web staff have lost almost all the last page of text (page 43 -- roughly 25%, at a crude estimate) and it ends in mid air: "If, however, you share your web history with Google, it will know that you like Italian food best because you search for it the most, and it will know the area you."

Since this is a colour magazine story, you will naturally expect a feeble conclusion, but here it is anyway:

[Google] does not simply want to be a good search engine on the web, it wants to be the web.
Will it get there? In the end, it's up to us. Google has only gone from being the most famous misspelling since "potatoe" to a verb recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary because you, me -- in fact, almost all of us -- use it. If we carry on logging on, it will carry on growing. And growing. If we don't, it won't. The choice -- the click -- is ours.



That would have been reasonable enough a few years ago, but it ignores all the interesting questions about what happens when Google pwns the Web, if it doesn't already. Google isn't just harvesting clicks, it is changing the whole online environment for the worse.

For example, many sites are no longer designed just for readers, and sometimes not for readers at all: they are designed to score well in Google, and in particular, to drive revenue from Google AdWords.

And for the tens or hundreds of millions of sites that live or die by AdWords, Google has life or death power over them. It can change the rules at any time, and you are not entitled to know this. Nor are you entitled to know what the rules are. As I've said before, Google acts as its own policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, and you have no right of appeal. The best you can do is suck up to Google and hang on to a percentage of the money your efforts generate, while Google rakes in billions.

Google is, of course, benign, but there is always a feeling that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Come back in five years when Google is 100 times more powerful.



Paris terrorist Salah Abdeslam has agreed to turn supergrassfor French police - making the ...
supergrass
ˈsuːpəɡrɑːs,ˈsjuː-/
noun
BRITISHinformal
  1. a police informer who implicates a large number of people.
    "both turned supergrass and were the main prosecution witnesses"

  • finger
  • (someone) to the police:he was fingered by a supergrass and charged with murder


  • consulate, consul, proconsul, consulate-general

    Stand News 立場新聞

    銅鑼灣書店股東李波自現身後,已兩度回港,更在街頭自拍證自由,不過英國外交部發言人回應本網查詢時表示,外交部仍深切關注李波事件,包括他在不自願的情況下,被帶到中國大陸,是嚴重違反《中英聯合聲明》;
    外交部繼續呼籲應完全地恢復李波的自由,並強調已準備好提供領事協助。
    銅鑼灣書店股東李波自現身後,已兩度回港,更在街頭自拍證自由,不過英…
    THESTANDNEWS.COM

    China refuses to clear 'Senkaku' books



    Of 892 books destined for a Japanese residents school that were seized at Shanghai customs in late January, eight have yet to be cleared for entry into China, sources at the school said Saturday.
    The eight remaining books cover geography and were ordered by the school in Pudong, which has 1,089 students and is part of the Shanghai Japanese School.
    Through the Japanese Consulate General in Shanghai, the Japanese government asked the Chinese government to explain the reason for the continued failure to release the books, but the Chinese side has yet to offer any explanation, the sources said.
    If China fails to give a convincing response for not releasing the books, the government will consider lodging an official complaint.
    According to sources, the Japanese Consulate General in Shanghai on Feb. 14 called on the Chinese customs authorities to disclose the reason for the seizure of the 892 books, explain which law was being applied and clear the books for entry as quickly as possible. As a result, all but the eight in question were cleared on Feb. 15.
    A local customs agent told the school officials that the release of the eight books remained blocked because further research into the content of the books was required.
    The Education, Science and Technology Ministry said the eight books are volumes one to eight of an atlas to be placed in the school's library. The first volume contains a map in which the Senkaku islands, which China claims, are indicated as Japanese territory. The government is assuming that the Chinese authorities saw this map as problematic.
    (Feb. 24, 2008)


    consul
    • 1. 領事{りょうじ}◆海外に在住して領事館に勤務し、自国の通商の便宜を図り、自国民を保護する領事館。
    • 2. 〔古代{こだい}ローマの〕執政官{しっせいかん}、コンスル◆ローマ共和国の最高位の官職。任期は1年で2名選出された。
    • 3. 〔フランス共和国{きょうわこく}の〕執政{しっせい}◆1799〜1804年の執政政府に3人の執政が置かれ、第一執政はナポレオン・ボナパルトであった。
    proconsul

    ━━ n. 【古ローマ】地方総督; 植民地総督.
    pro・con・sul・ar ━━ a.
    pro・con・su・late
     ━━ n. proconsulの職[地位・任期].



    consulate 

    Pronunciation: /ˈkɒnsjʊlət/ 

    NOUN

    1The building in which a consul’s duties are carried out:he called at the consulate in Palestine to pick up a visa
    1.1The office or position of a consul.
    2historical The period of office of a Roman consul.
    2.1(the consulate) The system of government by consuls in ancient Rome.
    3(the Consulate)The government of the first French republic (1799–1804) by three consuls.

    Origin

    Late Middle English (denoting the government of Rome by consuls): from Latin consulatus, from consul (see consul).

    con・su・late



    -->
    ━━ n. 領事館; 領事の職[任期].
    consulate general 総領事館[職].