World in Word

JAN 29 2021

layman

Volkswagen gets more than one-third of its sales in China, and HSBC made most of its profits from Chinese market in 2020. Some British Members of Parliament who advocate that HSBC should withdraw from Hong Kong SAR are a bunch of arrogant laymen.

presumptuous

This mistaken perception of China, coupled with arrogance and hubris, has contributed to the hysteria of some Western public opinion and policy toward China in the past few years, especially in the US. Some US political elites and their allies are so presumptuous about smearing China, regardless of the facts, and even blindly destroy their own interests just to contain China. Such irrationality is spreading in the West.

algorithm

The key to curbing this lies in regulating the algorithms of apps. Currently apps make their own algorithms for collecting data and making recommendations, but the process is not transparent.

JAN 15 2021

Groundhog Day

“It’s like the film ‘Groundhog Day.’ Another year, same story — record global warmth,” said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn’t part of the measurement teams. “As we continue to generate carbon pollution, we expect the planet to warm up. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing.”

drip,intravenous

"I was given a drip for seven days when I had a cough. The clinic neither gave me a nucleic acid test nor asked me to take one," 56-year-old Fan Li, recalling her memories as she suspects she contracted COVID-19 in late December.

Although China has invested a huge amount of money in promoting nucleic acid detection capabilities in county-level hospitals, interviews with villagers found that village doctors lack the ability to identify the virus, the awareness to report fever cases and still prefer to choose intravenous therapy that could lead to cross infections instead.

AUG 14 2020

keg: small cask, barrel

Putin’s message is no doubt more appealing than Thunberg’s to the nations seeking nuclear power, which include Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, India, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Sudan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Zambia. “It’s a powder keg type of situation,” says Rhodes, “as well as a longer-term question of who is going to shape the world.”

turnkey: completed and ready to use

Privately held Bechtel, currently completing two Westinghouse-designed AP1000 nuclear reactors for the Southern Company Electric Utility in Georgia, may be a good candidate—if it can count on federal support. Such a firm should offer turnkey nuclear plants, including financing, fuel, and initial operations, as it trains local engineers to take over.

forbearance: a delay in enforcing rights or claims or privileges; tolerance

Recent data suggest that the CARES Act and other public and private interventions have been largely successful so far in preventing a wholesale surge in household loan delinquencies. This outcome has been achieved in large part by providing income support, and by allowing borrowers to defer payments through mortgage and student loan forbearance programs and through additional temporary relief provided by auto loan lenders and credit card servicers.”

JUN 18 2020

unvarnished: naive, without stain or varnish, such as, a plain unvarnished truth

The 577-page book paints an unvarnished portrait of Trump and his administration, amounting to the most vivid, first-person account yet of how Trump conducts himself in office. Several other former officials have written books, but most have been flattering about the president. Other former officials have indicated they were saving their accounts of their time working for Trump until after he left office in order to speak more candidly. The Associated Press obtained a copy of Bolton’s book in advance of its release next week.

techy: easily irritated or annoyed, cranky, fractious, irritable, nettlesome, peevish, peckish, pettish, petulant, scratchy, testy, techy

The Western tech majors may have often tetchy relationships with rights holders but their strategic focus (for now at least) is to be partners for rights holders. Tencent’s strategy is one of command and control: vertical supply chain integration secured through the sort of behind-closed-doors influence that billions of dollars’ worth of equity stakes get you.

JUN 12 2020

ensconce: fit firmly, arrange, be seated

Instead of heeding calls from the U.S. and the world at large, Pompeo and politicians like him have chosen to waste time by ensconcing themselves in a shaky castle of lies and shifting blames.

feign: make believe with intent of deceive, make a pretence of

There might be one thousand ways to "make America great again," but feigning ignorance about the truth of social failures and playing blame-shifting games could never be part of them.

JUN 11 2020

tinge: a slight, a pale or subdued color

Washington has also, incredibly, chosen the middle of a global health crisis to withdraw funding from the World Health Organization, a body run by an African, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The former Ethiopian health minister complains that US-led criticism — centred on his supposed complicity in China’s initial cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak — has been tinged with racism.

skein: coils of worsted yarn, a skein of wool

He sought to portray China as wanting to wrap the continent in a skein of debt, seize its assets, extract its riches and smooth its own way with bribes. The audience must have smiled at the thought that what was being described was hardly new — and present long before China emerged on the scene.

spasm: jerk, convulsion

The protests have also triggered civic unrest in America at a scale not seen since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Protesters burned a police precinct in Minneapolis, torched cop cars in Los Angeles and Atlanta, and dodged plumes of tear gas from Tulsa, Okla., to Madison, Wis. By June 2, the National Guard had been activated in at least 28 states, and dozens of cities had imposed curfews to quell looting, arson and spasms of violence. Militarized police surged cruisers into crowds, fired rubber bullets at reporters and beat citizens peacefully exercising First Amendment rights.

pent:from pen, lock down

For 2½ months, America has been paralyzed by a plague, its streets eerily empty. Now pent-up energy and anxiety and rage have spilled out. COVID-19 laid bare the nation’s broader racial inequities. About 13% of the U.S. population are African Americans. But according to CDC data, 22% of those with COVID-19, and 23% of those who have died from it, are black. Some 44% of African Americans say they have lost a job or have suffered household wage loss, and 73% say they lack an emergency fund to cover expenses, according to the Pew Research Center. “It’s either COVID is killing us, cops are killing us or the economy is killing us,” says Priscilla Borkor, a 31-year-old social worker who joined demonstrations in Brooklyn on May 29.

kerosene: coal oil

If the video was the match and the coronavirus was the kindling, Donald Trump provided the kerosene. Since the start of his term, the President has turned the Oval Office into an instrument of racial, ethnic and cultural division. A man who both-sided a white-supremacist march, went to war with NFL players protesting police brutality, called African nations “sh-thole countries” and told American Congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from was never going to appeal for harmony now. As the Floyd protests spread, Trump called demonstrators “thugs,” threatened them with “vicious dogs” and borrowed a phrase popularized by the Miami police chief Walter Headley in 1967: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

subsume: contain, include, categorize

Protest is a performance, and the audience Black Lives Matter found during the tail end of the Obama Administration has been subsumed into the broader anti-Trump “resistance

subjugation: forced submission to control by others，conquest

In a way, Black Lives Matter has been a victim of its own accomplishments: it articulated a language of subjugation that could be applied to causes such as immigration or gender or class. Systemic injustice became about everything, rather than the original thing, which was police killing black people.

locus: location, location of collective

Police brutality has also made Minneapolis a locus of racial-justice activism.

reinstate: re-use

Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, reinstated a program that allowed the Pentagon to send state and local police forces surplus military equipment like armored vehicles, grenade launchers, bayonets and battering rams.

Alka-Seltzer: a medicine that you mix with water to make a drink that helps with indigestion

Not all Republicans are convinced. “Trump’s re-election chances are going down in flames,” says Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and Trump supporter. “It’s hard to see how these riots don’t boost Joe Biden’s claim to be the Alka-Seltzer America needs to soothe its stomach right now.”

miasma: haze,dirty air

But moments of grace have emerged from the miasma of pain and despair. In Camden, N.J., police locked arms with activists and marched along with them. In Flint, Mich., the Genesee County sheriff removed his riot gear, laid down his weapons and embraced protesters. From Fayetteville, Ark., to Omaha, police took a knee in solidarity.

JUN 02 2020

rubicon: a river name for boundary in Roman period, a red line. From the Rubicon , a stream which formed the border between Italy and Gaul. When Julius Caesar broke the law by crossing it with his army in 49BC, it led inevitably to war.

Trump has the full authority to use the federal government to go into states to restore order, Fox’s Sean Hannity said.
“If the liberal mayors or governors in most cases are unwilling and unable to protect their own citizens, the federal government will,” he said.
Not so fast, Rachel Maddow said on MSNBC.
“While there are depths that even the most doomsday predictions about the Trump presidency did not plumb, this rubicon moment arrived tonight in the haphazard and slipshod way that has become familiar for most of the other previously unimaginable dark turns this country has taken since Mr. Trump has become president,” she said.

onerous: not easily borne, harsh, worring

The issue comes amid rising tensions between Washington and Beijing. The dispute is also a departure from the type of bilateral agreements that the U.S. government has pursued for decades that aim to make it easier for airlines to expand to international airports without onerous government approvals. The U.S. does not have a so-called Open Skies agreement with China.

MAY 31 2020

juggle: cheat, bewitch, operate quickly

Renault was already under pressure when the coronavirus pandemic hit, posting its first loss in a decade in 2019. Like its peers, it is now trying to juggle a slump in revenue with industry-wide changes such as investment needed to produce more environmentally friendly vehicles.

tinderbox: a box containing igniting velvet, a situation likely very dangerous

“The threads of our civic life could start unraveling, because everybody’s living in a tinderbox,” said historian and Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley.

visceral: of viscera, a feeling obtained through intuition rather than reasoning or observation

Barbara Ransby, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a longtime political activist, said the toll of the coronavirus outbreak made long-standing racial inequities newly stark. Then, images of police violence made those same disparities visceral.

inertia: a disposition to remain inactive or inert

Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University, said the past is filled with events whose outcomes have not been as sweeping as they seemed to portend. He pointed to examples as disparate as the European revolutions of 1848 — famously said to be the “turning point at which modern history failed to turn” — and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which exposed lethal failures but did not cause political transformation.
“There seems to be a very powerful inertia pushing us back to normal,” Foner said. “I’m skeptical of those who think this coronavirus is going to change everything.”

norm: standard, model pattern, quoatation

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said Trump seemed to be exacerbating the crisis.
“It seems like many of the institutions that we have relied on to check government power have been weakened considerably over the last few years,” he said. “Norms that we took for granted have been eroded. And at a time when what is most needed is thoughtful, calm, deliberate leadership, we have the opposite.”

MAY 26 2020

caveat: warning, advice, a break in litigation

Furman noted that there is one major obvious caveat: “If there’s a second wave of the virus and a really serious set of lockdowns, I wouldn’t expect to see this. But I think the most likely case is the one I just laid out.”

nadir: the lowest point

One progressive Democratic operative pointed out that recent polling, taken during the nadir of the crisis, shows Joe Biden is struggling to best Trump on who is more trusted to handle the economy. “Trump beats Biden on the economy even right now!” he said. “This is going to be extremely difficult no matter what. It’s existential that we figure it out. In any of these economic scenarios Democrats are going to have to win the argument that our public health and economy are much worse off because of Donald Trump’s failure of leadership.”

spook: demon,haunt,frighten

The scenario would be a major long-term problem for any president. But before that reality sets in, Trump could be poised to benefit from the dramatic numbers produced during the partial rebound phase that is likely to coincide with the four months before November.
That realization has many Democrats spooked.

traverse: travel across, cover, climb the mountain

Since the Zoom call, Furman has been making the same case to anyone who will listen, especially the close-knit network of Democratic wonks who have traversed the Clinton and Obama administrations together, including top members of the Biden campaign.

MAY 12 2020 (a vegetable on headline)

daylily: (in Chinese huang hua cai)any of numerous perennials having tuberous roots and long narrow bladelike leaves and usually yellow lily-like flowers that bloom for only a day. People often likens the cold daylily to an event that has been delayed.

Xi walked into the daylily field and had a cordial conversation with villagers working there.
He was happy to learn that in recent years, thanks to the guidance of major enterprises and cooperatives, the farm achieved a stable output of quality daylily -- an edible plant -- with a guaranteed market and price, helping lift a number of impoverished households out of poverty.

ensnare: catch in a trap, embroil

President Donald Trump’s aggressive campaign to encourage sweeping investigations of his predecessor Barack Obama met a unanimous response from Senate Republicans: No thanks.
Trump’s Senate allies on Monday stopped short of echoing Trump’s claim that Obama acted illegally when the Justice Department began probing incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn in late 2016. And they indicated that the Senate would pass on investigating the former president as they conduct their own investigations that could soon ensnare other senior Obama administration officials.

MAY 11 2020

warren: rabbit tunnel, crowded place

The Trump administration is racing to contain an outbreak of the coronavirus inside the White House, as some senior officials believe that the disease is already spreading rapidly through the warren of cramped offices that make up the three floors of the West Wing.
“It is scary to go to work,” Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday. Mr. Hassett said he wore a mask at times at the White House, but conceded that “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”

valet: personal male attendant

Three top officials leading the government’s coronavirus response have begun two weeks of self-quarantine after two members of the White House staff — one of President Trump’s personal valets and Katie Miller, the spokeswoman for Vice President Mike Pence — tested positive. But others who came into contact with Ms. Miller and the valet are continuing to report to work at the White House.
The discovery of the two infected employees has prompted the White House to ramp up its procedures to combat the virus, asking more staff members to work from home, increasing usage of masks and more rigorously screening people who enter the complex.

MAY 07 2020

redact: compose, forge, edit, revise

Pressure from Trump allies to drop the charges (against Flynn) intensified last week after partially redacted documents turned over to Flynn's defense showed more about the FBI's thinking before interviewing Flynn.
The move drew furious criticism from congressional Democrats and others who accused the department and Attorney General William Barr of politicizing the U.S. criminal justice system by bending to Trump's wishes and improperly protecting his friends and associates in criminal cases.
The Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the charges with U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who has presided over the case and has a reputation for fierce independence. Judges generally grant such motions, but Sullivan could demand answers from the department about its reversal or even deny the motion and sentence Flynn, a less likely scenario.
Sullivan at a 2018 hearing expressed "disgust" and "disdain" toward Flynn's criminal offense, saying: "Arguably, you sold your country out."

furlough: temporary leave, dismiss for economic reasons

Additionally, 78% of those who lost their job in April said they were furloughed, meaning the unemployment in theory will be temporary. Goldman strategist Jan Hatzius said this is an important distinction to make, given that it suggests the recovery will be swifter.
“If job losses are concentrated in this segment [furlough], it would increase the scope for a more rapid labor market recovery when the economy eventually rebounds (because employees can be recalled to their previous jobs, as in several past recessions),” he wrote in a note to clients ahead of the report.