Adrienne Rich

NYTの記事、'A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism' By MARGALIT FOXから。

'Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.

* unswerving 〔考え方・気持ち・信念などが非常に強くて〕変わらない、揺るぎない、動じない、不動の

The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, with which she had lived for most of her adult life, her family said.

* rheumatoid arthritis 関節リウマチ

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.

* stifling 抑圧的な、重苦しい、息が詰まるような

For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets.

* indissolubly 〔関係などが〕永続的に

* unflagging 疲れを知らない、衰えない、不撓不屈の

All this helped ensure Ms. Rich’s continued relevance long after she burst genteelly onto the scene as a Radcliffe senior in the early 1950s.

* genteelly 上品に

Her constellation of honors includes a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1994 and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for “Diving Into the Wreck.” That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork.

In the title poem, Ms. Rich uses the metaphor of a dive into dark, unfathomable waters to plumb the depths of women’s experience:

* unfathomable 〔海などが〕深さが測れない、〔考えなどが〕理解し難い、深淵な

I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold. ...
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.'

＊アルクオンライン辞書出典

’Lawmakers ask app makers for privacy information’

Reuterの記事、'Lawmakers ask app makers for privacy information'（Mar 22 2012）By Gerry Shihから。

'Lawmakers sent letters on Thursday requesting information from more than 30 popular iPhone applications developers as part of an inquiry into how software companies collect private consumer data.

Recipients of the letter, including Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Path, were asked to provide information about the user data that is collected when consumers download their apps -- and how that data is used.

The letter came after several popular apps, including Path, the social networking tool, were found accessing and uploading address book data from users' iPhones without permission, sparking a massive online controversy last month.

* spark a controversy 議論の引き金となる、物議を醸す

Representatives Henry Waxman and G.K. Butterfield, two Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent the letter to 33 developers that had apps listed under the "iPhone Essential" area, a digital storefront curated by Apple in its App Store. The app makers have until April 12 to respond.

Apple, which was included as a recipient to the most recent letter, has also been tarnished by the scrutiny cast on its app makers; the iPhone and iPad maker has long said it subjects its app developers to a strict review before allowing new products into the App Store.

* tarnish 〔名声・名誉・評判などを〕汚す、傷つける、落とす

After the address book controversy emerged last month, Waxman and Butterfield sent a similar letter to Apple to request information about its App Store's consumer protection policies.

The apps inquiry is part of a broader tide of interest gathering on Capitol Hill around Internet privacy issues. In January, legislators including Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts criticized Google's plans to consolidate its privacy policies, saying it potentially violated a 2010 agreement that the web giant had struck with the Federal Trade Commission to improve its privacy policies.

(Reporting By Gerry Shih in San Francisco; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

'Loose cultures and free women'

Reuter.comの記事、'Loose cultures and free women' By Chrystia Freeland(March 15, 2012)から。

'With hindsight, we may find that the 2016 U.S. presidential race began last week, when Hillary Rodham Clinton made a politically electrifying point. ‘‘Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me,’’ she said at the Women in the World conference in New York. ‘‘But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women.’’

At a time when birth control has re-emerged as a political issue in the United States, 94 years after the first legal ruling to permit it, Clinton’s comments were an inspiring rallying cry for worried American women. But what about the mystery she identified? Why, as the secretary of state asserted, do extremists, from the Taliban to conservative Christians, want to control women?

An intriguing new study by two professors at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto suggests a possible answer. (Disclosure: I am on the school’s Dean’s Advisory Board.) Soo Min Toh and Geoffrey Leonardelli didn’t set out to discover why extremists want to control women. Their question was more familiar: Why aren’t there more female leaders?

Toh and Leonardelli argue that women are held back by ‘‘tight’’ cultures and can emerge more easily as leaders in ‘‘loose’’ cultures. ‘‘Tight’’ cultures are ones that have clear, rigid rules about how people should behave and impose tough sanctions on those who color outside the lines. Socially conformist, homogeneous societies like Japan, Malaysia, Norway and Pakistan are tight cultures.

* be held back 〔行動を〕（差し）控えさせられる、自制させられる、思いとどまらせられる。

Tight cultures, Toh and Leonardelli believe, hold women back because ‘‘cultural tightness provokes a resistance to changing the traditional and widespread view that leadership is masculine.’’

Loose cultures, by contrast, do not have clear norms and are more tolerant of deviation from the rules. Heterogeneous societies and countries in the midst of social and political transition, like Australia, Israel, the Netherlands and Ukraine, are loose cultures.

These are cultures in which ‘‘societal members tend to be more open to change, and this openness may become manifest in changing expectations and attitudes about the masculinity of leadership.’’

Here is where Clinton’s mystery comes in. Tight cultures are not necessarily sexist ones — witness the inclusion of Norway on the list. But extremist subcultures are certainly tight cultures, and they are built on historical assumptions of male dominance. The perspective of Toh and Leonardelli helps to explain why these rigid ideologies are so fixated on keeping women down.

* keep ... down ...を低くしておく

But what about the places like Norway: tight cultures where women do extremely well? Toh and Leonardelli’s answer to that apparent paradox is that where there has been a top-down decision to support female leaders, tight cultures are very good at executing that directive. That is because these societies are effective at acting on the collective will. If the decision is made to elevate women, tight societies will implement it.

‘‘Although a culturally tight country, Norway ranks high in terms of gender egalitarianism,’’ the study’s authors point out. In Norway, egalitarianism is not a rebellion against prevailing cultural norms. It is, instead, what Norway’s new top-down consensus requires: ‘‘Norway has among the most ambitious equal opportunity legislation in the world that legally requires firms to reach a 40 percent women board representation by 2017.’’'

豪州ウラン採掘、どうなる？

The Ageの記事、'Uranium on rise as dust settles on Fukushima' by Peter Ker (March 10, 2012)から。

'Nuclear may remain the only answer in a future where nations want energy without greenhouse gas emissions.

As the Friday afternoon shadows grew longer, Michael Jones thought the $10 million deal was in the bag.

* be in the bag 〔成功・契約などが〕確定して、確実で、間違いなしで、保証されて

The Impact Minerals boss had spent months negotiating a farm-in to the company's uranium deposit in Botswana, and finally the planets looked set to align.

''We were on the verge of what would've been a significant deal for us,'' he said, declining to name the suitor. ''They were going to leverage off their share price for the cash involved in that deal.''

But, just as the working week was drawing to a close that March afternoon, the deal suddenly changed.

Seven towering waves 15 metres high smashed into the eastern coast of Japan, claiming thousands of lives, homes and towns.

A nuclear power station was famously among the collateral damage and, while he was safe in Perth, Jones knew that he too would be affected by the catastrophe.

''I thought this is just gonna be a disaster for us,'' he recalled.

With a partial meltdown in progress at the Fukushima power station, the uranium sector would soon be swamped by the killer tsunamis, and Impact's Botswana deal was swept away with it.

''It basically disappeared over that weekend,'' Jones said.

A year on, the Fukushima disaster continues to weigh heavily on the industry, but an increasing number of investors believe the time is right to wade back into the uranium sector.

* weigh heavily on ... ～に重くのしかかる、～に重荷になる

It's no secret that uranium stocks fell off a cliff following the Fukushima failure. More than $1.5 billion was wiped of the value of ASX-listed uranium plays on the first day of trading after the disaster.

Paladin Energy and ERA lost more than $1 billion of that and within six months both companies - aided by troubles in Europe and a few self-inflicted wounds - had shrunk to barely 20 per cent of their former selves.

The spot price for uranium fell sharply, and a round of impairment charges swept through the industry.

* impairment 損傷を与えること

But the impact was most profound at the junior end of the market, where the fallout from Fukushima changed companies.

In an unfortunate collision between marketing and timing, Renaissance Uranium listed just three months prior to Fukushima as a ''pure-play'' uranium stock. Within months those ambitions had changed, and managing director David Christensen now describes the company as a ''broad based minerals exploration company''.

Renaissance is not the only uranium play now scouring its tenements for traces of other minerals to help pay the bills until uranium recovers.

Prior to Fukushima, Thundelarra Exploration had been devoting about 75 per cent of its time and money to developing uranium assets, but these days it spends more time talking about copper and gold.

''We have scaled right back on uranium … the company will be spending 10 per cent or 15 per cent of its effort on uranium this year and the rest would be predominantly copper and gold,'' said Brett Lambert, who stood down as managing director of Thundelarra this week. ''From a technical perspective it's not the right thing to do but from a market reality it's the only way to go forward.''

The trend repeated through the many company presentations at last month's Paydirt uranium conference in Adelaide, prompting one industry veteran to quip that copper and gold had never before enjoyed so much airtime at a conference devoted to uranium.

Many analysts and funds managers believe the punishment handed out to the uranium sector after Fukushima was overly severe.'

'Black Students Face More Discipline, Data Suggests'

NYTの記事、'Black Students Face More Discipline, Data Suggests' (March 6, 2012) By TAMAR LEWINから。コメント欄では様々な意見が闘われています。

'Black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students, according to new data from the Department of Education.

Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. The data covered students from kindergarten age through high school.

* expulsion 退学処分

One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.

And in districts that reported expulsions under zero-tolerance policies, Hispanic and black students represent 45 percent of the student body, but 56 percent of those expelled under such policies.

* zero-tolerance いかなる違反も許さない

’《a ～》ゼロ・トレランス政策、ゼロ容認の方針［姿勢・政策］◆地区教育委員会が示した細かい生徒行動綱領に基づき、各学校は校則を整備し、父母らに通達する。自らの行動に責任がとれる年齢に達する生徒には、それに基づき責任を取らせる。これは罰の体験や反省を通して立ち直らせることを目的としている’ (引用元　アルク)

“Education is the civil rights of our generation,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in a telephone briefing with reporters on Monday. “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”

The department began gathering data on civil rights and education in 1968, but the project was suspended by the Bush administration in 2006. It has been reinstated and expanded to examine a broader range of information, including, for the first time, referrals to law enforcement, an area of increasing concern to civil rights advocates who see the emergence of a school-to-prison pipeline for a growing number of students of color.

According to the schools’ reports, over 70 percent of the students involved in school-related arrests or referred to law enforcement were Hispanic or black.

Black and Hispanic students — particularly those with disabilities — are also disproportionately subject to seclusion or restraints. Students with disabilities make up 12 percent of the student body, but 70 percent of those subject to physical restraints. Black students with disabilities constituted 21 percent of the total, but 44 percent of those with disabilities subject to mechanical restraints, like being strapped down. And while Hispanics made up 21 percent of the students without disabilities, they accounted for 42 percent of those without disabilities who were placed in seclusion.

“Those are extremely dramatic numbers, and show the importance of reinstating the civil rights data collection and expanding the categories of information collected,” said Deborah J. Vagins, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office. “The harsh punishments, especially expulsion under zero tolerance and referrals to law enforcement, show that students of color and students with disabilities are increasingly being pushed out of schools, oftentimes into the criminal justice system.”'

ニューヨーク在住アジア人の喫煙者

NYTの記事、'For Many Asian New Yorkers, Smoking Is Still a Way of Life' By SARAH MASLIN NIR (March 1, 2012)から。

On a cool, damp afternoon in Flushing, Queens, Seung Jun stood outside on Main Street on Thursday, a smoker among his peers. He unsheathed a Parliament and took a long drag, as though he were taking in a breath of relief.

* unsheath （タバコの箱からタバコを）抜く

All around him, other Asian men engaged in the same ritual, on the sidewalks, in doorways and on bicycles. Here, in the heart of the city’s largest Asian community, smoking is still a way of life.

The city’s Asian population has been stubbornly resistant to the otherwise successful efforts by the Bloomberg administration to curb smoking among New Yorkers. Smoking rates among the city’s Asian communities have not budged since 2002 — most notably among Asian men, despite decreases in the habit among almost every other demographic, according to data from the city’s health department.

* curb ... 抑制する、～に歯止めをかける

On Thursday, the department stepped up its appeals to Asian smokers, introducing graphic ads in Chinese for its annual campaign to distribute nicotine patches and gum, and offering Chinese speakers for those who call 311 to enroll in the program. The department will also seed the ethnic news media with translated versions of its antismoking campaign called “Pain,” which depicts excruciating smoking-related cancers.

* excruciating 　ひどく苦しめるような

“We looked at our data very carefully to understand who is still smoking in New York City,” said Jenna Mandel-Ricci, a deputy director at the Bureau of Chronic Disease Prevention and Tobacco Control. She added that the city’s Russian community, about a quarter of whom smoke, would be given the same kind of attention.

Part of the problem is rooted in homeland: Nearly 70 percent of men in both China and South Korea smoke, for example, according to the World Health Organization (for women in both countries the number is below 10 percent). In New York City, the numbers are far lower: about 17 percent of Asian men smoke, and under 5 percent of women, according to the health department.

But unlike most other demographic groups in the city, Asian men smoke at a rate that did not show a statistically significant drop from 2002 to 2010. Among blacks, for example, the rate fell to 12.5 percent from 20.8 percent. And among whites, it dropped to 15.6 percent from 23.8 percent.

Among Asians, there are “persistent cultural norms around smoking that the city’s policies and programs have not really penetrated,” said Dr. Donna Shelley, an associate professor at the New York University School of Medicine, who has studied smoking in the city’s Asian communities. For example, gifts of cigarettes at a holiday gathering, where other groups might give, say, a bottle of Malbec, are routine, Dr. Shelley found.

“It’s a largely accepted part of our culture,” says Grace Meng, a Queens assemblywoman who is Chinese-American and represents Flushing. She says she is shocked when people think nothing of lighting up over a business dinner.

While the trend is citywide, Flushing, with one of the highest concentrations of Asians in the five boroughs, seems to encapsulate the different dimensions of the problem.

On Thursday, Chinh Vu, 60, who moved here from Vietnam three decades ago, was feeding his pack-a-day habit with a fresh Dunhill cigarette outside of CJ Food Market on Main Street. All his peers smoke, he said, but not his children and grandchildren. “Over here they don’t smoke, they go to school, they learn something and they don’t smoke,” he said. “Good for them. It’s not good for me, but I can’t stop.”

The problem is less prevalent among Asian women. In most Asian countries, less than 10 percent of women smoke, and even fewer smoke in New York. However, some researchers say that smoking among young Asian-American girls seems to be rising, as they seek to keep up with their peer group, who often view smoking as hip.