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C'est une reprise de la semaine dernière avec quelques rajouts...

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THE REGULARS: Summary
A) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic News: Inauguration Concert [De jeunes musiciens jouent pour l'investiture de Bush.]
B) CNN/Global Office: Companies bolster relief effort [Les contributions des entreprises suite au tsunami.]
C) Car Talk/The Puzzler: Guillotine Dream [Un casse-tête. On ne triche pas !]
D) The Miami Herald/Dave Barry's Year in Review [HUMOUR ! Le regard de Dave Barry sur l'année 2004. Ici, le mois de FEVRIER.]

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B*) CNN/Global Office: Overtime costs UK works $43bn [Les heures supp non payées coûtent cher aux salariés britanniques.]
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/01/06/overtime.uk/index.html
Overtime costs UK workers $43bn

Friday, January 7, 2005 Posted: 1147 GMT (1947 HKT)

LONDON, England -- Many workers in the UK may have been lucky enough to bank a Christmas bonus last month, but new figures suggest most of them may still be out of pocket. According to figures released this week, British employees did unpaid overtime worth as much as $43 billion last year.

The Trade Union Congress (TUC), which conducted the research, said that each employee who performed an average number of extra hours should have received an extra $8,700 if paid at their normal hourly rate. Or, to put it another way, if they had done all their unpaid overtime at the start of the year, they would have worked for free until February 25.

The TUC said that London workers suffered the worst deal with more than 700,000 people putting in average of 7.9 unpaid hours a week -- almost a complete extra day at the office every week. Had they been paid for the extra time, the average London worker would have picked up more than $13,000 on top of their regular annual wage.

The average number of unpaid hours for the UK as a whole was 7.3 hours.

Long hours can contribute to stress, poor health and relationship problems, and few managers would argue that tired, burnt-out staff are good for business. But TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber warned that the UK, which already has the some of the longest work hours in Europe, had become an overtime culture, in which companies were increasingly reliant on workers exceeding their contracted hours.

"We're not saying that we should turn into a nation of clock-watchers. Most people do not mind putting in some extra time when there's a crisis or an unexpected rush. But too many workplaces have come to depend on very long hours. They get taken for granted and staff have to do even more if there is an unexpected rush," said Barber.

"Worst of all is that many long hours workplaces are inefficient and unproductive. People are putting in long hours to make up for poor organization and planning in the workplace. It also puts employer complaints of the costs of benefits such as pensions or time off for new parents into perspective. Employers have been cutting back on pensions even as their staff put in longer hours."

To draw attention to the issue, the TUC has declared February 25 "Work Your Proper Hours Day," when it is urging staff to stick to their contracted hours to remind their bosses how much they depend on their extra efforts. "Take a proper lunch break, not just a sandwich at your desk, and leave on time, to enjoy your own time on Friday evening," it says. "Why not get together with friends working nearby, and go for a coffee, a pint, or take in a show? You deserve it! This is one day in the year for your boss to appreciate your efforts, and for you to appreciate yourself."

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2*) The Economist: The software-development industry [Il est de plus en plus de difficile de concevoir des logiciels.]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3423238
The software-development industry: Managing complexity
Nov 25th 2004

Most software projects fail to meet their goals. Can this be fixed by giving developers better tools?

ON SEPTEMBER 14th, the radios in an air-traffic control centre in Palmdale, California shut down, grounding hundreds of flights in southern California and Nevada, and leading to five mid-air encounters between aircraft unable to talk to the ground controllers. Disaster was averted because aircraft managed to communicate with more distant back-up facilities. But why did Palmdale's radios fail? A glitch in the software running the system meant the computers had to be re-booted every 30 days, and somebody forgot to do so. But software running a mission-critical system should not have to be restarted every month. The culprit: poor design.

At least Palmdale's software worked some of the time. The same cannot be said of an $4 billion write-off that America's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had to swallow when a multi-year effort to overhaul its computer system failed completely in 1997. And such problems are confined neither to governments nor to America. A £456m ($844m) project for Britain's Child Support Agency came in over a year late, and has failed to deliver payments to more than half of eligible applicants.

As software has become more and more pervasive in business and government, and more complicated, the impact of poor software design has been steadily growing. A study earlier this year by the Standish Group, a technology consultancy, estimated that 30% of all software projects are cancelled, nearly half come in over budget, 60% are considered failures by the organisations that initiated them, and nine out of ten come in late. A 2002 study by America's National Institute of Standards (NIST), a government research body, found that software errors cost the American economy $59.5 billion annually. Worldwide, it would be safe to multiply this figure by a factor of two. So who is to blame for such systematic incompetence?

Cost overruns and delays are common in numerous industries—few large infrastructure projects, for instance, are completed either on time or on budget. But it is peculiar to software that billions of dollars can be spent only for nothing useful to result. At a very basic level, it is the fault of the software engineers who are writing the programs, and of their bosses. Even companies that specialise in software development suffer from delays and overruns. An obvious example is Microsoft: its “Longhorn”, the long-heralded successor to its Windows XP operating system, was originally scheduled for launch this year. Longhorn is now not expected before mid-2006, and many of its key features have been put off until 2007.

The prevalence of such failures can be explained by one startling weakness: the tools available to software developers. As software projects have become more and more complicated, it has become impossible for even the most talented team of programmers to keep track of the millions of lines of “code” required. As long ago as the 1980s the industry began to rely heavily on software-development applications—basically, software that helps write software, for example by creating reusable modules that form part of broader processes. The problem is that these have simply not been up to the task. As a report in May by Forrester Research, another consultancy, succinctly put it: “Corporate software development is broken.”

Dale Fuller, the boss of Borland, a software-development company, agrees. He also thinks he can fix the problem of weak tools. So does John Swainson, long in charge of software development at IBM and now bound for the top job at Computer Associates. John Montgomery, who runs such things for Microsoft, does not think the situation is quite so bad. However, he believes Microsoft has what it takes to “commoditise common problems” and so enable average software developers to write above-average programs. And a bevy of smaller companies offers solutions as well. The challenge facing all of these companies is how to create tools that are reliable, yet capable of dealing with millions of lines of code and requirements that can shift, sometimes alarmingly, during a project's lifetime.

The importance of the software-development sector to business as a whole is huge. It is also an increasingly substantial business in itself (see chart). And, as Mr Montgomery points out, although selling software-development applications is profitable for Microsoft, it is also a way of winning new business. Better development tools mean more software is written for Windows, which in turn means more people are likely to use the operating system. Ditto for rivals—one reason IBM is making a big push to support development in various flavours of Unix (including in the “open source” version—ie, software code that is non-proprietary and ostensibly free to anyone—Linux). Unix is a long-established operating system that remains the biggest threat to Windows.

Three main trends are shaping the future of software development and giving hope to those who oversee big software projects. The first is awareness of the need to pay greater attention to the lifecycle of a piece of software, from the initial setting of requirements to ongoing implementation. The second trend is towards automating the testing of software. The NIST study estimates that $22.2 billion (more than one-third) of the cost of software failures could be eliminated simply by improved testing. The third trend is the emergence of open-source code, something embraced even by Microsoft, which is often seen by its many critics as the would-be nemesis of the open-source movement.

The five-step program

There are five steps involved in creating a piece of software: enumerating the requirements; designing the program; actually writing the code; testing it; and then deploying it. Traditionally and naturally enough, this was seen as a sequential process. However, Mr Swainson points out that by the time an organisation gets around to deploying a piece of software, its requirements have often already changed. This, he says, means that an “iterative” model, in which an organisation continually cycles through the five phases, makes more sense than the traditional “waterfall” which puts them in sequence.

Although the consensus among software-development providers is that iterative models are the way forward, a note of caution is in order. A paper by Phillip Laplante and Colin Neill of Penn State University in the February issue of ACM Queue, a scholarly journal, claims that, in practice, the waterfall remains by far the most popular model. It may be that real change is lagging behind developers' marketing literature, or that the iterative approach is more style than substance.

Borland, though, is betting its business on the success of the iterative model. In September it announced “Software Delivery Optimisation”, an approach that seeks to bring together all five bits of the development cycle, along with the people who are constantly making decisions about the project. At the heart of the system is management software called Themis (the Greek goddess of order), planned for release in the first half of 2005. Themis will have a module that turns models automatically into programming code. When code is written, it will instantly update the requirements input by the business developers. Mr Fuller says that this will transcend even the iterative model because the iteration will be so fast as to be seamless. As soon as a portion of the code is completed, it will be tested. As soon as requirements change, programmers will instantly change course.

If that sounds a bit utopian, it is by no means unique. In October, IBM announced its newest package, called “Atlantic”, which is poised to compete with Themis. Atlantic is based both around IBM's own products and those of Rational, a company bought by IBM in December 2002 for $2.1 billion. Not to be left out, Microsoft will release a similar product called Visual Studio 2005 sometime in the first half of next year. The rhetoric of this rush of entrants into the marketplace is almost indistinguishable.

This is partially due to the fact that, although they are competitors, and fierce ones at that, they are also collaborators. Mr Montgomery points out several bits of development software—WS-Routing, for instance (which handles network routing) and WS-Security (you guessed it, security)—that were developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft. Both firms trumpet that their development software is used by an impressive percentage of the world's largest companies, and both support the same basic standards, such as XML (a language for exchanging data on the web) and other web protocols.

Indeed, so-called web services—programs that are meant to run on the web and be accessed by many computers remotely—are the primary battleground for the next generation of software-development applications. The business case rests on the view that almost anything can be done over the web. This is particularly true for the most common, commodity-type applications where most of the available revenues appear to be.

Tick this box

One snag is that, so far, web services have turned out to be much harder to deliver than their champions had hoped. Consider the example of a relatively simple challenge: enrolling 6m Americans living abroad who wanted to use the internet to cast their votes in the recent elections. America's Defence Department, which has responsibility for helping expats to vote, decided to launch a pilot program for 100,000 people, and even came up with an acronym: SERVE, or Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment. In February, after $22m had already been spent, the project was abandoned. The software was judged to be too unreliable.

The various efforts to prevent the occurrence of such disasters—IBM's web-services platform is called WebSphere, and Microsoft's suite of development tools for web services is known as .NET—have more similarities than differences. IBM tends to favour Java as its native programming language, while Microsoft prefers C#, a language it developed itself. However, both firms' platforms support other languages. Borland claims that, being neutral, it does a better job, but marketing seems to be as important as technology when it comes to winning market share.

That is why Mr Montgomery emphasises Microsoft's efforts to create an “ecosystem” of developers. He says that the company has spent, over the years, hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars investing in the Microsoft Developer Network. This is certainly a busy website—some 3m developers a month visit to exchange programs and ideas, Mr Montgomery says. Indeed, some of the developers come up with products that compete directly with elements of .NET.

What's more, Mr Montgomery says that the tools made by companies such as Component 1 and Infragistics are better than Microsoft's own, and that this is something Microsoft encourages. The small fry make millions of dollars by staying one step ahead of Microsoft, but the giant benefits because its overall ecosystem is strengthened.

If software development in general is somewhat fragmented, in the area of software testing there is one clear market leader: Mercury Interactive, a company based in Mountain View, California. Other companies, especially IBM, are trying to make inroads into testing, and Mercury itself is trying to expand into other areas, particularly through an initiative called “Business Technology Optimisation” (yes, the initiatives all start to sound rather similar). That aims to do the kind of system-level integration at which companies such as Borland have traditionally been best. However, industry watchers say there is real promise in efforts to refine the testing process.

There are two sorts of software testing. The first, unit testing, tests a very small subroutine to see that it does what it should. The second, functional testing, is actually trying to use the software. Unit testing is far more straightforward—it is easier to test if a brick will crumble than if an entire structure is sound. Functional testing, on the other hand, is tricky—how is one to know if the software is fully tested? However, according to Mercury, about 60% of the necessary functional testing can be automated—things like repeatedly entering data. And automation allows the developers to explore a far larger number of test cases than would be possible by hand, in far less time. The gains are even greater when software is revised—old automated tests can often be re-used, whereas manual testers would have to start from scratch.

The benefits of this approach are amplified by the transition to the iterative approach—testing is much more effective if its results can be easily re-integrated into the software. Indeed, there is a symbiosis here: the faster testing made possible by automation is easing the transition from the waterfall model to an iterative one. Hence the interest from IBM and Microsoft.

An open-source solution?

The third big industry trend is arguably the most promising of them all. As Mr Montgomery points out, there are two ways of thinking about open-source software development. The first is to see it as a business model, and the second is to understand it as a development process. Microsoft, he says, makes a large amount of source code available under a so-called shared-source licence, which grants users downstream a limited set of rights to modify and use the code.

For purists, this is not enough. However, Mr Montgomery says it suffices to build the sort of community Microsoft wants, while retaining its ability to make a profit. (For instance, people are allowed to take the code, modify it and sell it, but only if it will be used on a Microsoft operating system.) IBM uses a similarly restrictive licence, but it has built its platform on top of Eclipse, a purer open-source framework for building integrated development environments.

However, other companies, such as CollabNet, a firm based in Brisbane, California, are using a less restrictive licence, along the lines of what is traditionally thought of as open source, with only one exception—the licence allows for commercial use. Brian Behlendorf, founder and chief technology officer of CollabNet, says that the open-source ethos allows programmers, particularly those collaborating from different locations, to work together more efficiently. He contends that the freedom to tinker with and improve tools essentially without restriction is the best route to efficiency. Mr Behlendorf was a pioneer in the development of the well-known Apache open-source web server, so his views come as little surprise. Less predictably, they are shared by businesses not usually thought of as being open-source enthusiasts.

For instance, CollabNet signed a deal earlier this month with Barclays Global Investors (BGI), a large asset manager, to provide it with development tools for the next three years. Mr Behlendorf points out that software-development companies, like software companies themselves, are moving towards a model of selling services rather than products. The tools that CollabNet uses are almost all open-source, but by paying “rent”, clients get the benefits of the company's expertise. It seems to work. BGI reports that since it first started using CollabNet two years ago, the time it takes to complete a project has halved.

The three big industry trends—lifecycle management, testing and open source—come together in a movement known as “agile” programming. This approach to software development was codified in a meeting in February 2001 in Utah when a group of programmers declared its allegiance to doing things quickly, using common sense and simplicity. The canonical example of what they are trying to avoid was a 1980s program called CONFIRM. Funded by a consortium of hotels, airlines and rental-car companies, it was meant to be a comprehensive travel-reservation system. After three and a half years and $125m, it was cancelled.

The main principle of agile programming is that developers must talk to each other often, and that they must talk to the business people setting requirements equally often. Combine this with a short time-scale—ideally agile proponents seek to deliver a working bit of software every few weeks—and you have an accelerated, informal version of the iterative model. This means that no project can go on for years and produce nothing—a fatally flawed project will be caught sooner.

Gartner, a consultancy, estimates that agile programming will have a substantial impact on high-priority projects. Nonetheless, pessimists argue that the problems plaguing software development are so fundamental that none of the many innovations being pursued today will really make a difference. In mitigation, software engineering is still an immature discipline. It is just possible that the techniques now being pursued by Microsoft, IBM and their growing army of competitors will lead to a future where failure is an exception rather than the rule.

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2**) International Herald Tribune: Writing clear English [Les entreprises américaines renvoient leurs salariés à l'école pour apprendre à écrire convenablement un anglais déformé par l'e-mail et les SMS.]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/08/business/email.html

Challenge for office: Writing clear English
By Sam Dillon The New York Times
Thursday, December 9, 2004

Deficit found as e-mail replaces phone

BLOOMINGTON, Illinois Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an e-mail message recently from a prospective student. "i need help," said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. "i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you"

Hogan receives hundreds of e-mails monthly from managers and executives seeking to improve their writing or their workers' writing each month. He says the number has surged as e-mail has replaced the phone for much workplace communication. Millions of employees must write more frequently on the job than previously. And many are making a hash of it. "E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited," Hogan said. "It has companies tearing their hair out."

A recent survey of 120 American corporations reached a similar conclusion. The study, by the National Commission on Writing, a panel established by the College Board, concluded that a third of employees in major U.S. companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training. The College Board is a U.S. organization that helps students going to college.

The problem with writing shows up not only in e-mail but also in reports and other texts, the commission said. "The more electronic and global we get, the less important the spoken word has become, and in e-mail clarity is critical," said Sean Phillips, recruitment director at Applera, a California company that makes equipment for life science research, where most employees have advanced degrees. "Considering how highly educated our people are, many can't write clearly in their day-to-day work."

"It's not that companies want to hire Tolstoy," said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, an association of leading chief executives whose corporations were surveyed in the study. "But they need people who can write clearly, and many employees and applicants fall short of that standard."

Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.

For example, an e-mail from a systems analyst to her supervisor at a high-tech corporation in Palo Alto, California, said, "I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'." That message persuaded the analyst's employers that she needed remedial training.

Some $2.9 billion of the $3.1 billion the National Commission on Writing estimates that corporations spend each year on remedial training goes to help current employees, with the rest spent on new hires. An entire education industry has developed to offer remedial writing instruction to adults, with hundreds of public and private universities, for-profit schools and freelance teachers offering evening classes as well as workshops, video and online courses in business and technical writing.

Kathy Keenan, a former legal proofreader who teaches business writing at the University of California Extension in Santa Cruz said she sought to dissuade students from sending business messages in the crude shorthand they learned to tap out on their pagers as teenagers. "hI KATHY i am sending u the assignmnet again," one student wrote to her recently. "i had sent you the assignment earlier but i didnt get a respond. If u get this assgnment could u please respon. thanking u for ur cooperation."

Most of her students are midcareer professionals in high-tech industries, Keenan said.

Even chief executives need writing help, Roger Peterson, a freelance writer in Rocklin, California, who frequently coaches executives, said. "Many of these guys write in inflated language that desperately needs a laxative," Peterson said, and not a few are defensive. "They're in denial, and who's going to argue with the boss?"

But some realize their shortcomings and pay Peterson to help them improve. Don Morrison, a former auditor at Deloitte & Touche who has built a successful consulting business, is among them. "I was too wordy," Morrison said. "I liked long, convoluted passages rather than simple four-word sentences. And I had a predilection for underlining words and throwing in multiple exclamation points. "Finally Roger threatened to rip the exclamation key off my keyboard."

Exclamation points were an issue when Linda Landis Andrews, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, led a workshop in May for midcareer executives at an automotive corporation in the Midwest. Their exasperated supervisor had insisted that the men improve their writing.

"I get a memo from them and cannot figure out what they're trying to say," the supervisor wrote Andrews. When at her request the executives produced letters they had written to a supplier who had failed to deliver parts on time, she was horrified to see that tone-deaf writing had turned a minor business snarl into a corporate confrontation moving toward litigation. "They had allowed a hostile tone to creep into the letters," she said. "They didn't seem to understand that those letters were just toxic."

"People think that throwing multiple exclamation points into a business letter will make their point forcefully," Andrews said. "I tell them they're allowed two exclamation points in their whole life."

Hogan, who founded his online Business Writing Center a decade ago after years of teaching composition at Illinois State University, says that the use of multiple exclamation points and other nonstandard punctuation like the ":-)" symbol are fine for personal e-mail but that companies have erred by allowing experimental writing devices to flood into business writing. "E-mail has just erupted like a weed, and instead of considering what to say when they write, people now just let thoughts drool out onto the screen," Hogan said. "It has companies at their wits' end."

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A) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic News: Inauguration Concert [De jeunes musiciens jouent pour l'investiture de Bush.]
http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/news/article_wed.asp

Inauguration Concert
Gabriella Castaneda, 13, California
Scholastic Student Reporter

Loud music, screams, glow sticks, and giant video screens with slogans urging young people to volunteer to help their communities. That was the scene at the inaugural youth concert in the D.C. Armory today in the nation's capital.

About 5,000 teens showed up to show their passion for politics and performance. The two-hour show featured singers Hilary Duff, JoJo, Ryan Cabrera, and Ruben Studdard. They were all part of "America's Future Rocks: A Call to Service."

The nation's capital is celebrating the inauguration of President George W. Bush all week. President Bush will be sworn in to his second term of office on the steps of the Capital at noon on Thursday. The Republican candidate defeated his Democratic opponent, John Kerry, in last year's presidential election.

Political parties didn't matter at the youth concert today.

"I wanted to visit Washington, D.C., and see a part of history that is the presidential inauguration, regardless of my political views," said Marshall Aberle of New Orleans, Louisiana. The 16-year-old proudly wore a pair of "Democratic" boxers outside of his jeans. He said he worked for Kerry during the election campaign.

"We're spending the whole week learning about the government," said Berta Aguilar, 17, a member of Close Up Washington. The organization sponsors a seven-day civics lesson for at least 2,000 students and teachers. Aguilar and her friends spent the earlier part of the day visiting monuments. They also heard a speech by Secretary of State nominee Condeleezza Rice. "I love everything [we're doing.] I really do," said Berta.

Starry Night

A star-studded lineup of performers kept the crowd rocking between breaks, showcasing kid volunteers. The volunteers were introduced by celebrities like former New York Giants cornerback Jason Sehorn, and Nancy O'Dell of Access Hollywood.

Shauna Fleming, 17, gave a million thanks to soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. "I told my dad I wanted to collect thank-you letters for the soldiers, and he said, 'Why don't you collect a million?'" Sauna told the crowd. He was kidding, but she did it anyway, recently presenting the millionth letter to President Bush at the White House.

Clayton Lillard, 15, of San Antonio, Texas, collects used bicycles and rebuilds them to give away at Christmas. His group, Clayton's Backyard Crew, has so far given more than 700 bikes to kids whose parents are in prison.

"Right now there is an organization in your community that needs your help," said TV's latest winner of The Apprentice, Kelly Purdue. "Call them!"

Surprise Guests

The biggest hit of the night was a surprise visit by the President and First Lady. The President and Laura Bush stood on stage with all the young volunteers highlighted in the program.

"I'm standing here on stage with some of America's soldiers in the army of compassion," Bush said. "I want to thank you for your service. And as all of you out there enjoy this concert and the great freedom of America, I hope you take away the lesson of helping someone in need. It not only helps the nation, It'll lift up your spirits as well."

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B) CNN/Global Office: Companies bolster relief effort [Les contributions des entreprises suite au tsunami.]
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/01/10/companies.tsunamiaid/index.html
Companies bolster relief effort

Monday, January 10, 2005 Posted: 1659 GMT (0059 HKT)

LONDON, England -- Companies from around the world have been at the forefront of the aid effort that has followed last month's tsunami disaster. Governments and aid organizations have pledged more than $5 billion, Reuters reported, towards re-building the shattered coastlines and communities of the Indian Ocean.

A significant part of that effort will be funded by corporate donations. "This is the biggest movement of corporate generosity we have ever had for an emergency call in terms of the amounts given," Pascal Freneaux of Medecins Sans Frontieres told Reuters.

Total donations in the U.S. have already reached $180 million, including $10 million contributions from drugs company Pfizer and Coca-Cola. Elsewhere Deutsche Bank have contributed $13.23 million and Standard Chartered Bank said they would give two-thirds of their profits in Asia and a minimum $5 million to tsunami-related relief.

"Just about every company of every size is doing something," Curt Weeden of Contributions Academy, which trains managers of corporate philanthropy programs, told The Associated Press. "It really has engendered an amazing kind of response."

Many companies, with well-established international logistical capacities, are also uniquely placed to contribute directly in getting food, drinking water and medical care to the survivors of the catastrophe and in re-establishing sanitation and communication.

Among some of the companies already playing a role in the aid effort are Pfizer and fellow pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, which have donated healthcare supplies and antibiotics; Vodafone and France Telecom, which are helping to provide emergency communications in affected areas; and logistics companies TNT and DHL, which are providing trucks, planes and warehouses to support the relief effort.

German industrial giant ThyssenKrupp, which has plants in both India and Thailand, has also said it will rebuild a village and set up an orphanage in each country. "With these concrete, sustained projects we want to contribute to the reconstruction process. As well as providing humanitarian aid, we wish to express our closeness with these countries in which we have been active for many years," said ThyssenKrupp chairman Prof. Dr. Ekkehard Schulz."

Part of the corporate contribution has been handled by the Disaster Resource Network (DRN), which was set up by the World Economic Forum in 2002 to "leverage the resources of the international business community to mitigate the human suffering associated with disasters." In recent days the DRN has coordinated the arrival and distribution of aid supplies at airports in Sri Lanka and Bandar Aceh. DRN executive director Bob Bellhouse said the organization also hoped to organize corporate efforts to assist in the economic regeneration of the affected regions. "We will convene international business leaders to look beyond emergency life saving activities to strategies for rebuilding livelihoods," said Bellhouse. "The business sector has a key role to play in the region's economic recovery process and in developing collaborations with governments and NGOs to minimize the human and economic costs of future disasters."

But for most companies the most effective way to contribute is simply to give cash. In the aftermath of the tsunami there were reports that so much unsolicited aid was arriving that local airstrips were struggling to handle the traffic.

The American Red Cross also warned that donations of resources or aid products could actually hinder operations by using up "limited resources to process or facilitate the donations, (and) prohibitive transportation and storage logistics and expenses."

World Health Organization representative William Aldis told Reuters that the U.N agency would only accept drugs that had been labeled in the language of the recipient country and that were within six months of their expiry date. Aldis said that many of the drugs contributed to the humanitarian effort in Kosovo had proved to be old and unusable. "Sometimes the problem in disasters is that not requested and unneeded drugs are coming in," said Aldis, who suggested that some companies used charitable donations as a form of tax relief. "In Kosovo, millions of dollars were spent to dispose of drugs by incinerating them."

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D) The Miami Herald/Dave Barry's Year in Review [HUMOUR ! Le regard de Dave Barry sur l'année 2004. Ici, le mois de janvier.]
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/
columnists/dave_barry/10496338.htm?1c

FEBRUARY

2004 | The politics, the passion, and Paris

Speaking of shocking revelations, in FEBRUARY the nation -- already troubled by bad news from Iraq, coupled with a resurgence in terrorism and a slow economic recovery -- is traumatized by something that leaves a deep and lasting scar on the fragile national psyche: Janet Jackson's right nipple, which is revealed for a full three ten-thousandths of a second during the Super Bowl halftime show. This event is so traumatic that the two teams are unable to complete the game, with many players simply lying on the field in the fetal position, whimpering. It is a moment reminiscent of the JFK assassination, in that virtually all Americans can remember exactly where they were when it happened.

''I was on the sofa,'' they say. Or: ''I was in the bathroom and missed the traumatic moment, but fortunately we have TiVo.''

As the nation reels in shock, the networks ban all programs that feature any kind of nudity, including unclothed fish. Congress also swiftly swings into action: Democrats blame the Bush administration, noting that the nipple was revealed on Bush's watch; while Republicans point out that, during all eight years of the Clinton administration, Janet Jackson clearly possessed nipples, and Bill Clinton was almost certainly aware of this.

Bush himself suggests the possibility that the nipples could have originated in Iraq. John Kerry notes that there were nipples in Vietnam.

Elsewhere in politics, feisty Internet genius Howard Dean drops out of the Democratic race after losing 17 consecutive primaries, despite leading in every single exit poll. Meanwhile, Ralph Nader announces that he will again run for president, a decision that is hailed unanimously by Nader's support base, which consists of Ralph and his friend Wendell the talking space turtle.

In entertainment news, the feel-good hit of the winter is Mel Gibson's wacky film romp The Passion of the Christ, although critics of product placement object to the scene where Pontius Pilate can be seen holding a Diet Sprite.

On the cultural front, the mayor of San Francisco attempts to legalize same-sex marriage, which outrages those who believe that marriage is a sacred institution that should be entered into only by heterosexual people, such as Britney Spears and Mike Tyson.

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THIS WEEK'S TEXTS

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1) Bush Inaugural: Calendar of Events [Le planning de l'extravagante cérémonie d'instauration de M. Bush.]
http://www.inaugural05.com/events/

Tentative Calendar of Events

TUESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2005
SALUTING THOSE WHO SERVE The MCI Center 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
CHAIRMAN’S RECEPTION Mellon Auditorium 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.
AMERICA'S FUTURE ROCKS TODAY The Armory 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19, 2005
CHAIRMAN’S BRUNCH Mellon Auditorium 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
A CELEBRATION OF FREEDOM The Ellipse 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
CANDLELIGHT DINNER #1 Union Station 7:00 - 10:00 p.m.
CANDLELIGHT DINNER #2 The Washington Hilton 7:00 - 10:00 p.m.
CANDLELIGHT DINNER #3 National Building Museum 7:00 - 10:00 p.m.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2005
ST. JOHN’S CHURCH SERVICE St. John’s Church 9:00 - 10:00 a.m.
OATH OF OFFICE CEREMONY US Capitol 12:00 p.m.
INAUGURAL PARADE Pennsylvania Ave. 2:00 - 4:30 p.m.
CONSTITUTION BALL Washington Hilton 7:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m.
FREEDOM BALL Union Station 7:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m.
INDEPENDENCE BALL Convention Center (A) 7:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m.
TEXAS WYOMING BALL Convention Center (B) 7:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m.
LIBERTY BALL Convention Center (C) 7:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m.
DEMOCRACY BALL Convention Center (D) 7:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m.
PATRIOT BALL Convention Center (E) 7:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m.
STARS AND STRIPES BALL Convention Center Ballroom 7:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m.
COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF BALL National Building Museum 7:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 21, 2005
NATIONAL PRAYER SERVICE National Cathedral 10:00 - 11:00 a.m.

Swearing-In Ceremony

President George W. Bush will be sworn in by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and deliver his second inaugural address on the west front of the U.S. Capitol. Speaker Dennis Hastert will administer the oath of office to Vice President Dick Cheney. Joining them will be their families, members of the Cabinet and Administration, members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, U.S. Supreme Court, Diplomatic Corps, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other invited guests.

The Reverend Dr. Luis Leon will deliver the invocation for the ceremony and Pastor Kribyjon Caldwell will deliver the benediction. Mezzo-Sopranos, Susan Graham and Denise Graves will perform during the program. Once the Presidential oath is taken, the military will render a 21-gun salute, the Army Herald Trumpets will play “Four Ruffles and Flourishes” and the U.S. Marine Band will play “Hail to the Chief.”

Following the swearing-in ceremony, the President will join invited guests in Statuary Hall for the Congressional luncheon. After lunch, the President will be escorted by U.S. Army Major General Galen Jackman to the east side of the U.S. Capitol for the pass in review, then onto the presidential motorcade for the start of the parade.

The language of the presidential oath is specified in the Constitution. The vice-president takes the same oath as other high-ranking federal employees.

Presidential Oath:

I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God.

[NOTE DE MARC : Ceci est un pur mensonge. Le texte de la Constitution ne parle nullement de "So help me God". La clause en question indique : "Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--'I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.' "]

Vice-Presidential Oath:

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

Tickets for the swearing-in ceremony are required for the Capitol lawn, the Capitol reflecting pool, and the National Mall from 3rd to 4th Streets, NW. Beginning in January 2005, tickets will be distributed to constituents in January 2005 by both senators and representatives of the 109th Congress as well as by the Presidential Inaugural Committee. For more information on ticketing for this ceremony, go to http://inaugural.senate.gov.

The Parade

The best opportunity to participate in the inaugural events is the parade, when military and civilian bands and other fanfare will march along a 1.7 mile-route from Capitol Hill to the White House and hundreds of thousands of people are able line the route and watch.

The parade will begin about 2:30 p.m. on January 20, 2005. The parade route starts at the intersection of Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues and continues down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

Organizing this precisely timed formation of some 11,000 people, floats, vehicles and horses is no small feat. From logistical support, such as buses, warming tents and food, to security and public safety, much will be happening behind the scenes to create the flawless event that will be viewed by half-a-million spectators.

Parade preparations begin months in advance when applications are gathered from bands and other marching units from across the country on behalf of the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC). As the event gets closer, PIC selects participants for the parade.

Efforts are made to have as many states represented in the parade as possible. The parade normally lasts about two hours.

The parade is open to the general public. Bleacher seats are available from the Presidential Inaugural Committee for $15, $60, and $125, but seats are limited.

Inaugural Balls and Festivities

Inaugural balls have long been a part of the celebration of the Presidential Inauguration and lend a celebratory flair to the week’s events. The first official Inaugural ball was hosted by President James Madison in 1809, who charged an entrance fee at the door. The President and First Lady watched their guests dance from a platform, then joined them for a formal supper afterward.

Inaugural balls throughout history have continued to capture the personality and style of each incoming president. Balls are typically divided by states at hotels and other spaces throughout Washington, D.C.

Other Events

Other Inaugural events will likely include lectures, seminars, public entertainment, a prayer service and a presidential gala on the eve of the Inauguration. Inaugural festivities also include dozens of unofficial receptions and parties throughout Washington, D.C. The President and First Lady only attend the official balls.

Presidential Inaugurals set the tone for a new administration and reflect a president’s personality. From the Inaugural ball themes to the Bible chosen for the swearing-in ceremony, each inauguration develops its own style.

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