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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: One bracelet at a time [La mode des bracelets caritatifs, vue du bon côté. POUR UN REGARD PLUS SCEPTIQUE VOIR TEXTE 3.]
B) Executive Planet/Business Culture: Guide to business conversation in the US [Un petit guide pour bien converser avec vos contacts d'affaires AUTRICHIENS.]
C) Car Talk/The Puzzler: Fuel economy [Un casse-tête. Comment faire pour réduire la consommation en carburant du foyer ? On ne triche pas !]

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Bb) CNN/Global Office: Monday morning bad for your health [Le lundi au boulot, c'est mauvais pour la santé.]
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/02/03/monday.pressure/index.html
Monday morning bad for your health
Thursday, February 3, 2005 Posted: 1735 GMT (0135 HKT)

(CNN) -- Monday mornings could seriously damage your health, according to new research. A study carried out by Japan's Tokyo Women's Medical University and published in the American Journal of Hypertension showed that many workers suffer a significant increase in blood pressure as they return to the office after the weekend.

High blood pressure is associated with a greater risk of suffering a heart attack or a stroke, and the results could help to explain why there are more heart attacks on Mondays than at any other time of the week.

Research published several years ago in the British Medical Journal showed a 20 percent spike in heart attacks at the beginning of the week. In the latest study, 175 men and women were fitted with devices to measure fluctuations in their blood pressure over the course of a week. The results showed a surge among those getting ready for work on Monday morning. Volunteers who were not going to work didn't experience a comparable increase, suggesting a link between increased blood pressure and work-related stress.

"Most people are free of the mental and physical burdens of work on a Sunday and experience a more stressful change from weekend leisure activities to work activities on Mondays," said Dr Shuogo Murakami, who led the research.

High blood pressure could also be caused by the stress of commuting. British psychologist Dr David Lewis recently showed that commuters suffered higher levels of stress than fighter pilots during their journey to work, with many recording increased heart rates at levels more usually associated with vigorous exercise.

Belinda Linden, Head of Medical Information at the British Heart Foundation, said a morning peak in blood pressure and the fact that more heart attacks occurred on Monday than on any other day of the week were both recognized by researchers. But she added that "larger and better controlled studies" were needed to establish the cause of the trends. "This relatively small study looks at the weekly variations of blood pressure, and has found that Monday morning provides the highest peak," said Linden. "Although it is tempting to try and explain these findings, and to assume that the return to work is a factor, the constraints of this study mean we cannot be sure of the causes of this variation."

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Bc) CNN/Global Office: Ancient and modern management [Alexandre le Grand, un modèle pour les PDG d'aujourd'hui ?]
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/01/18/alexander.guru/index.html
Ancient and modern management

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 Posted: 1620 GMT (0020 HKT)

(CNN) -- The short, spectacular life of Alexander the Great has always been Hollywood material. By the time of his death aged just 32 in 323BC the Macedonia-born Alexander had conquered the ancient world, extending his empire across one million square miles from Greece to India.

In his latest screen incarnation, Alexander, played by Colin Farrell in the eponymous Oliver Stone-directed epic, is portrayed as the greatest warrior in history.

But many business experts believe the lessons of Alexander's career have as much relevance for boardroom as battlefield strategists. According to Partha Bose, author of "Alexander the Great's Art of Strategy", modern executives can learn from Alexander's campaigns in three key areas. "It fundamentally boils down to three things: it is where you want to compete, when and how you want to enter or exit that market and how do you want to go about competing when you are in that market," says Bose. "Those are fundamentally the three key strategic issues and again when you take a look at Alexander the Great's history you find that he was pretty much the first ever general to systematically think through those three key issues. "Strategy is only as good as the organization's ability to execute it. Here again, there are lessons from ancient times."

One modern manager who has drawn inspiration from Alexander's campaigns is Federal Express founder and CEO Fred Smith. "Primary was his organizational skills," says Smith. "He organized his army in a way that had never been done. That organization allowed him to play to his strengths, minimize his weaknesses and prevail over opponents who were much larger."

In Oliver Stone's cinematic portrait, Alexander's greatest achievement comes at the Battle of Gaugamela where his 50,000-strong Macedonian army defeats the forces of the Persian king Darius, five times its size. Stone believes Alexander's tactical flexibility and willingness to delegate authority gave him a decisive military advantage. "He had great instincts in battle," Stone told CNN. "He was very fluid, always changing as the battle developed. He was quick to react. Alexander was a great believer in teamwork and he delegated authority beautifully. "The Persians could not move without central approval. It was all governed by Darius in the center. Alexander went for the head. He knew that if he killed Darius he would kill the snake."

Bose agrees that delegation and instinct were central to Alexander's thinking. "We see him trusting a nine-year-old shepherd boy, and getting this shepherd boy to lead the entire army over the Uxion mountains in Persia," he says. "There are many other situations where he would put his trust just like that in whoever it was he encountered. But a sign of great leadership is that great leaders know whom to trust and do put their faith in lots and lots of people."

But for all Alexander's improvisational abilities on the battlefield, his achievements were also a consequence of careful preparation and forward thinking. "We know that there was significant rehearsal and planning," says Stone. "They even had markers, they drew marbles of the enemy, they drew carved statues and they made battle plans like they do at West Point today."

In war, Alexander could be a brutal and cunning opponent. Yet his empire was founded on a respect for local cultures and a belief that peace and internal stability could only exist through prosperity. "All throughout his life you see Alexander going out of his way to embrace other cultures, and the cultures that he did invade saw that he wasn't trying to impose on them his way of doing things," says Bose. "What was happening was that the local culture and the Greek culture would melt together in ways that even the people who were conquered found quite interesting and innovative. The Nestles, the Unilevers or the Procter and Gambles of the world have been able to succeed across the globe because none of them imposed a system on the nations they were going into that came from their origins. They all worked out something that was in line with the local cultures and local tastes, and that is what globalization is all about. So there are really a lot of great leaders and part of their greatness lies in being able to adapt themselves to the local cultures."

Smith, who describes Alexander as "the first truly global thinker," says Federal Express have tried to emulate that approach when moving into new markets. "We have to deal with different cultures, attitudes, different people. Doing that is part of our company's success," he says. "I think Alexander was the first person who did that successfully. He didn't just capture and enslave them. He was enormously successful in putting together a truly global empire."

-- CNN's Robyn Curnow contributed to this report.

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1b) Los Angeles Times: Costs make employers see smokers as a drag [Des entreprises américaines commencent à exclure les fumeurs de leur personnel. VOIR ARTICLE 1 POUR LA SUITE.]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=5&u=/latimests/20050128/
ts_latimes/costsmakeemployersseesmokersasadrag

Costs Make Employers See Smokers as a Drag
Fri Jan 28, 7:55 AM ET
By Daniel Costello Times Staff Writer

Employers have recently tried every carrot they can think of — including cash incentives and iPods — to persuade employees to quit smoking. Now some are trying the stick.

Pointing to rising health costs and the oversized proportion of insurance claims attributed to smokers, some employers in California and around the country are refusing to hire applicants who smoke and, sometimes, firing employees who refuse to quit.

"Employers are realizing the majority of health costs are spent on a small minority of workers," says Bill Whitmer, chief executive of the Health Enhancement Research Organization, an employer and healthcare coalition in Birmingham, Ala.

Federal and state laws bar employers from turning down applicants or firing workers based on race, religion or gender. Some states have enacted laws offering similar protections for smokers. But experts say workers in nearly half the states, including California, have few legal options if employers decide to prohibit them from smoking outside the workplace.

Employees in many states "work at the discretion of their employers and can be terminated for almost any reason as long as it's not illegal," says Stephen Sugarman, a law professor at UC Berkeley.

Last fall, Union Pacific Corp., an Omaha-based transportation company, stopped hiring smokers in seven states. Company executives said the move was made to help quell employee health costs, which have jumped more than 10% each of the last three years. Weyco Inc., an employee benefits firm with 200 employees in Okemos, Mich., began random drug tests for nicotine on Jan. 1, saying it would fire workers who failed the test or refused to quit smoking. (Four Weyco employees resigned rather than take the test, says the company's president, Howard Weyers.) The Riverside County Sheriff's Department plans soon to require applicants for deputy sheriff positions to sign a no-smoking agreement.

In most cases, employers are asking workers to report their smoking habits voluntarily or adding disclaimers such as "nonsmokers only" to job postings. Others are requiring workers to take breathalyzer tests that can catch traces of carbon monoxide in their lungs or submit to urine tests to detect nicotine.

A sheriff's office in Florida is asking job applicants who have a recent history of smoking to pass a polygraph test proving they no longer smoke outside of work.

Employees, workers' rights groups and some unions are decrying the smoking bans as an invasion of individual rights. "What you do in your own home after work or on the weekend is none of your bosses' business," says Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, N.J., a spinoff of the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites). "The last time I checked, tobacco is a legal product." Maltby says his organization is trying to persuade some states to pass broader worker-protection laws.

Critics of the smoking bans say it's not clear that smokers are more costly than other workers, such as people who are obese. Though some studies have shown that smokers have higher absentee and lower productivity rates than nonsmokers, economists say the research is limited. It's possible, they say, that smokers don't dramatically increase health costs with chronic and expensive conditions like emphysema, heart disease and cancer until they're much older, when they may be employed elsewhere or retired. "It sounds right for employers to say, 'If we get rid of them, we'll save money.' But no one has the concrete data to prove that right now," says Tom Morrison, senior vice president of Segal Co., an employee benefits consulting firm in New York.

Although smoking rates continue to fall across the country — an estimated 23% of adults smoke today, down from 37% in 1970 — employers say they need to find new ways to rein in health costs. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy group based in Menlo Park, Calif., health insurance premiums rose 11.2% last year, the fourth consecutive year of double-digit growth.

Some companies have begun charging smokers higher health insurance premiums and forcing others into employee wellness programs filled with smoking-cessation plans. Last month, Alabama announced plans to raise insurance rates on public employees throughout the state who smoke, and it is considering doing the same with obese workers. And, of course, many employers have banned smoking within the workplace for years.

In December, a national study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that nearly a third of U.S. employers polled had smoking-cessation programs; 5% prefer not to hire smokers and 1% refuse to hire smokers.

Weyers, of Weyco, says he instituted his new employee smoking policy after realizing that "if I don't do something to change employees' demand for healthcare, I'll never do anything about costs." Weyers estimates he now spends $750,000 a year on employee health premiums, and he worries he can't absorb many more cost increases. The company self-funds its insurance plan so any reduction in health costs would bring immediate savings.

Weyers says that though some employees complained about the smoking ban — and several left — most employees have slowly come to accept the new policy. The company estimates that about 10% of its workforce smoked and calculates that 28 employees and their spouses have quit since the new initiative was announced a year ago.

Critics are concerned that if more companies follow suit, it will lead to other employer intrusions on workers' lives. What is to stop companies from telling workers they can't ride motorcycles? Or eat junk food?

Legal protections of off-work activities vary considerably around the country, with the general rule giving employers the right to fire an employee for nearly any reason. Employees in Colorado are protected in most legal behaviors outside of work, whereas those in New York are protected when engaging in specific activities like recreation, politics and consumption of legal products. California has less protection around workers' off-the-job behavior, although they can participate in political organizations. California prohibits random employee drug testing other than for job applicants and workers in high-risk occupations such as trucking or medicine.

Maltby, of the Workrights Institute, says employees are facing a variety of challenges to their freedoms outside of work. A worker in Texas was fired in 2003 for having an affair off the job. This fall, a woman in Alabama lost her job for refusing to remove a John Kerry (news - web sites) bumper sticker from her car. (She was later hired by the Kerry campaign.)

Sugarman, of the University of California, says big employers may shy away from "paternalistic behavior," such as banning smoking outside of work, because it could make it more difficult to recruit and retain workers. Union Pacific says it will allow some exceptions to its policy. The company will hire a smoker if it cannot find another suitable applicant, a company spokeswoman says.

Michael Halpern, a physician and health researcher at Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm Exponent Inc., has studied smoking-related costs for employers. His research suggests that smokers may have higher rates of absenteeism because they are more likely to suffer from upper respiratory infections and other illnesses. Also, smokers may be more likely to have less healthful lifestyles, such as poor diets and infrequent physical activity. Still, he recommends employers stick with positive incentives to entice smokers to quit.

"My feeling is that the data is just too limited to support" drastic moves such as firing, he says

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2b) 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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2c) Slate/Foreigners: Is France Getting Religion? [Constat d'une reprise de la religion dans les banlieues parisiennes.]
http://slate.msn.com/id/2112962/
foreigners/Opinions about events beyond our borders.
Is France Getting Religion?/In the immigrant suburbs of Paris, secularism is on the wane.
By Elisabeth Eaves
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2005, at 8:55 AM PT

PARIS—If France is a fortress of secularism, you wouldn't know it from a Sunday morning visit to St. Denis. Jehovah's Witnesses set up camp each week near the frenetic outdoor market. Muslims wear headscarves and frequent the halal butchers. Back in November, posters advertising end-of-Ramadan celebrations vied for wall space with posters touting Christian preachers on tour. And presiding over this Parisian suburb, which was once known as a bastion of communism, is the Basilica of St. Denis. As the first Gothic cathedral ever built, it's a monument to divinely inspired creativity.

When I visited in January, the Jehovah's Witnesses had set out a board covered with signs in French and Arabic. Their question of the day, printed in Arabic, read, "Is the cross a Christian symbol?" A blond Frenchman was holding an animated Arabic-language discussion about God with two passersby. His colleague Georgette Daguerre told me, "We're like the apostles in the first century. We go to the market to talk to people about Jesus." It's a remarkable market: multilingual and multi-ethnic, selling everything from ladies underwear to lunch, with more than 300 stalls sprawled between a medieval architectural gem and the sharp concrete angles of a futuristic town center.

A 10-minute walk from the market is the Evangelical Assembly of the Pentecost. While the flocks drawn to the famous basilica these days are mainly tourists ogling the stained-glass rosettes, this Pentecostal church draws more than 400 worshippers every Sunday to premises that couldn't be more different. Stark white on the inside, the church occupies the ground floor of a plain brick apartment block

Pentecostalism, a wing of Protestant Christianity that emphasizes spirituality, is the fastest-growing faith in the world. Born in a Topeka, Kan., Bible college in 1901, it now numbers 520 million people worldwide, with the greatest numbers in Africa and South America.

Pentecostalism is growing in France, too, turning Protestantism, historically the embattled religion in a Catholic society, into a burgeoning faith. That still puts Protestants at only 2.2 percent of the over-18 population, according to a new study commissioned by the Protestant weekly Réforme—a little larger than the Jewish population but smaller than the Muslim community, which makes up between 5 percent and 10 percent of the French population.

Unlike most of the 64.3 percent of French citizens who still identify with Catholicism, the new Protestants are vigorous worshippers. Sébastien Fath, a sociologist who has written extensively on Protestantism in France, noted in a recent paper that while accelerated secularization has marked French society since the 1960s, evangelicals (who here are mostly Pentecostal) seem to have escaped the trend. "Whereas the Catholic Church has had to close seminaries, Evangelical Protestants … had to answer increased demand for training," he wrote.

With subsets of Protestantism and Islam its two growing religious forces, France mirrors the larger world. And the expansion in both cases is a direct result of the larger world coming to France.

Worshippers at the Evangelical Assembly of the Pentecost in St. Denis, a suburb of Paris
"The arrival of people of color is a major factor," said Christian Capron, pastor of the Evangelical Assembly of the Pentecost. He is a white Frenchman who grew up in a Pentecostal family and worked as a missionary in Eastern Europe before taking the helm at St. Denis in 1971. "Without them we wouldn't have the same growth." They come from French possessions in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, from Haiti, and in large numbers from Africa, Capron said. Most of his congregation is black. On my Sunday morning visit, I meet a woman from Gabon whose husband is from Madagascar. (The growth of evangelical Christianity in France has also been aided by American missionaries.)

One could get the impression, in the immigrant suburbs that ring Paris, that France's famous secularism is on the wane. One very popular politician seems to think so. Nicolas Sarkozy, chief of President Jacques Chirac's UMP party, has made a bid to bring religion and state a little closer together.

Last fall Sarkozy generated huge media attention with the publication of his book La Republique, les religions, l'esperance (The Republic, Religions, Hope), in which he talked about his own Catholic faith and called for a greater role for religion in public life.

He has also argued for amending France's law separating church and state, which turns 100 this year. The 1905 law bars any state funding of religious groups and is the cornerstone of French secularism. Amending it would allow for the financing of mosques. Unlike churches and synagogues, mosques weren't around to be funded before 1905, and so Islam has wound up relatively shortchanged in terms of real estate. The idea behind helping mosques is that doing so would bring Muslims more into the mainstream, thus countering extremism.

But France is not getting religion, at least not yet. So far, Sarkozy's foray into American-style public religiosity has gone over like a lead balloon. Whatever the French may do on their weekends, there has been no show of support for relaxing the state's strict secularism. The new ban on religious symbols in public schools is, on the whole, popular. And President Chirac has reiterated his support for the 1905 law numerous times.

Pastor Christian Capron at the Evangelical Assembly of the Pentecost in St. Denis
Moreover, both Capron, the pastor, and Fath, the sociologist, note that the French tend to see religions outside of the mainstream as "sects," and thus suspect. This extends to official policy: A parliamentary committee has indexed 173 sects to keep an eye on, among them Pentecostal churches.

So, the French state has drawn its line in the sand once again in a clash of civilizations that is not between West and East, or between Judeo-Christian culture and Islam, but between secularists and believers. The problem is, drawing a line in the sand against religion looks increasingly like drawing a line in the sand against immigrants. France has never done a particularly good job of integrating new arrivals, which is why the cultural trends in the halo of suburbs just outside Paris' périphérique can look so different from those in the Seventh Arrondissement, where museums and government ministries dot the Left Bank.

After the Sunday service, as the milling crowd outside the church resolves itself into carpools, a stranger named Noura comes up and kisses me on both cheeks. She says she found Jesus seven years ago after being brought up in an Arab Muslim home. "I was looking for God," she explains. "I was knocking on his door."

The drafters of the 1905 law were convinced that religion had no future. "They had just come out of a 19th century … that predicted the death of God. The republicans thought the churches were going to empty," said historian Emile Poulat, recently interviewed in the newsweekly Valeurs Actuelles. Indeed, some of the drafters thought that with state funding pulled, religion would collapse.

That collapse has yet to take place. Sarkozy, who has been praised for his fresh thinking on crime and the economy, may yet prove prescient on religion, too. As the global south heads north in a big way, it brings its faith. The state can bar religion from public life, but the crowd knocking on the door is only going to grow.

Elisabeth Eaves is the author of Bare, which was recently released in paperback.

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A) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic News: One bracelet at a time [La mode des bracelets caritatifs, vue du bon côté. POUR UN REGARD PLUS SCEPTIQUE VOIR TEXTE 3.]

http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/news/article_wed.asp
One Bracelet at a Time
Rachel Laskow

If you visit any school in America, you are bound to see students wearing yellow, rubber Livestrong bracelets, promoted by cyclist Lance Armstrong. But soon you might see a new color band: blue. It's all part of an effort being led by two middle-school students to cure diabetes.

Sydney Davis, 12, and Daniel Rosen, 13, of North Caldwell, New Jersey, both suffer from diabetes, a disease in which the body loses its ability to control the amount of glucose (a type of sugar) in blood. They saw the success of the Livestrong bracelets in raising money for cancer research, so they decided to do the same for diabetes. "I want to have a cure [for diabetes] sometime in my lifetime," Sydney said.

The blue (Sydney's favorite color) bands read "Cure Diabetes Today," and the response to them has been incredible. When Daniel showed up to school with 100 bracelets, he sold out of them after second period. In fact, Sydney and Daniel sold out of the 10,000 bracelets they ordered in just four weeks. "I was very surprised when we sold all of them. I thought we'd only sell a few," Daniel said.

The project started as a way to raise money for the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center, where Sydney and Daniel are treated. The center does diabetes research in hope to someday find a cure. Sydney and Daniel have raised more than $30,000 so far and want to raise $100,000. "I am totally amazed by the outpouring of support," Sydney's mother, Leslie, said.

Daniel's father, Allen, believes the bracelets are so popular because everyone knows somebody who has diabetes. In America, about 18 million people suffer from the disease. But with the money being raised by Sydney and Daniel, a cure may be possible in the future. "It's been a win-win for everyone involved, a team effort," Allen said.

Before creating the blue bracelets, both Sydney and Daniel sported the yellow Livestrong bands. Daniel thinks the rubber bracelets are so popular with kids because the money goes to a good cause and they like how they look. "What's to lose?" he said.

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B) Executive Planet/Business Culture: Guide to business conversation in the US [Un petit guide pour bien converser avec vos contacts d'affaires AUTRICHIENS.]
http://www.executiveplanet.com/business-culture-in/139444377687.html
Conversation

General Guidelines

# Austrian formality in business discussions also carries over into personal conversations.
# Displaying knowledge of Austrian history and culture demonstrates an awareness of the uniqueness of Austria, which will be appreciated by Austrians, who will take against anyone who fails to recognise the clear distinction between them and the Germans. Do not refer to Austrians or their culture as German. The only thing that is truly German about Austria is the language and, even then, Austrian German is very different from standard or High German [Hochdeutsch] in vocabulary, idiom, and pronunciation. Indeed, even proficient German-speakers may struggle with the Austrian accent and regional dialects, especially if they are not already acquainted with Bavarian German.
# Do not make idle promises during conversation. Politeness does not mean dissimulation or hypocrisy. Austrians expect you to mean what you say, and say what you mean, and they will know when you do not.
# Nevertheless, Austrians wear their formality with a certain easy lightness and a major distinction between Austrian and German characters is that the former are much more tolerant of fooling around than their neighbours [there is a long tradition of pantomime and farce in Viennese theatre]. Austrians have a great sense of humour that is not always refined or subtle and they will accept your joking so long as you are self-deprecating at the same time. Teasing others, though, may be interpreted as putting them down, and that is certainly not appreciated. Unless you are confident of your command of German idiom and/or Austrian taste, it is perhaps best for a visitor to avoid making jokes that can be easily misconstrued in another culture. Humour has no place at a formal meeting or in the office at all when senior staff are present.
# As always it is courteous to have some knowledge, however basic, of your host's language. Any attempt to speak German will be appreciated, even if you can only manage simple greetings and phrases, but a minimum of 'restaurant' German may be essential outside the major cities.

Welcome Topics of Conversation
# Classical music [Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Johann Strauss, Bruckner, Schönberg and Berg were all Austrian]
# Opera [especially Mozart and Richard Strauss, even though he was born in Munich]
# Austrian art and architecture
# Winter sports

Topics to Avoid
# Money
# Separation and divorce
# Religion
# Anti-Semitism
# Austria's role during World War II

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THIS WEEK'S TEXTS

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1) Los Angeles Times: Where there's smoke, it wouldn't lead to firing [Un législateur du Michigan propose d'interdire les sanctions contre des salariés fumeurs. VOIR TEXTE 1b.]

http://www.latimes.com
THE NATION
Where There's Smoke, It Wouldn't Lead to Firing
Michigan firm bans all nicotine use by workers. A state lawmaker wants to snuff out such rules.
By P.J. Huffstutter
Times Staff Writer

February 8, 2005

CHICAGO — A Michigan state lawmaker said Monday that he planned to introduce a bill to bar companies from firing employees for smoking on their own time. The proposed "lifestyle legislation" comes in response to a policy at Weyco Inc., an employee benefits firm in Okemos, Mich., near Lansing. On Jan. 1, Weyco began randomly testing its 200 workers for nicotine use, saying it would fire those who tested positive and refused to quit smoking. Four Weyco employees have said they were let go under the policy. "Two of those employees are my constituents, and they came to me asking for help," said state Sen. Virg Bernero, a Democrat from Lansing who plans to introduce his bill in the next three weeks.

If passed, Michigan would become one of the few states with a law expressly stating that employers could not fire or refuse to hire people for engaging in legal activities on their own time. "I don't like smoking, but what this company is doing is just un-American," Bernero said. "These are things happening off duty…. If it's legal to fire someone for smoking at home, what's next? A company that fires employees for having a couple beers during the Super Bowl because the boss is a teetotaler? Firing someone because they wear clothes on the weekend that the boss doesn't like?"

In a statement released Monday, Weyco Chief Financial Officer Gary Climes said smoking was clearly a health hazard, and that Bernero's legislation would make it more difficult for employers to control health costs. "When you do something that is extremely harmful to both yourself and others, it's not a privacy issue — it's a matter of exercising some personal responsibility for your behavior," Climes said in the statement. "Michigan businesses, taxpayers and co-workers of smokers have the right to protect themselves from the horrendous damage caused by the self-destructive behavior of a small percentage of employees."

Company officials said the policy was put into place to encourage healthful behavior among workers, as well as to underscore its health-conscious corporate culture. Inside the company's headquarters is a framed, handwritten note from Thomas Edison to Henry Ford. Dated April 1914, it reads: "I employ no person who smokes."

Weyco President Howard Weyers said last month that he also had rolled out the policy to combat the rising costs of employee benefits: "If I don't do something to change employees' demand for healthcare, I'll never do anything about costs." Weyers estimated the company spent $750,000 a year on employee health insurance premiums and said he was concerned that it wouldn't be able to absorb additional increases.

But Anita Epolito — one of the four fired workers — said she had not been participating in Weyco's insurance plan. "I'm covered by my husband's insurance policy, and have been for years," said Epolito, 48, who worked as a receptionist and special events coordinator at Weyco for 14 years. Epolito said Weyers first told employees about the policy during a benefits meeting in November 2003. At the time, workers were told they couldn't have any nicotine products in their bodies, she said. "There were some people who were trying to quit, using the patch or the chewing gum. We were told that if you're going to quit, you have to stop — and stop using those products — by Jan. 1 [2005]."

Epolito said she approached Weyco executives shortly before the deadline and asked what she should do.

"They told me to sign the waiver saying I refused to be tested so I could be given my final check," Epolito said. "So that's what I did."

Michigan's Kalamazoo Valley Community College instituted a similar policy last month, saying it wouldn't hire smokers for full-time positions. School officials could not be reached for comment Monday.

Federal and state laws prevent employers from firing or refusing to hire workers because of race, religion or gender. Some states, such as Colorado, have enacted laws offering similar protections for smokers. Colorado lifestyle-discrimination statutes are considered to be among the broadest in the nation, legal experts said. Workers cannot be fired for taking part in legal activities, unless those actions affect their work. Bernero said his staff was using the Colorado law as a guide for the proposed Michigan legislation.

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