Joined into night & The Party v

the people
http://www.economist.com/news/science-andtechnology/21621703-early-history-hiv-has-nowbeen-charted-detail-journey-night
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21621803communist-party-faces-its-toughest-challengetiananmen-time-it-must-make-wiser

By: Lucas Salas Ferrada

Class: ED1106C

How AIDS first spread

Journey into night
The early history of HIV has now been charted in detail

Oct 4th 2014 | From the print edition

RAILWAYS are one of humanitys most important inventions. But they can transport bad things
as well as good, and one of those bad things is disease. In particular, suggests a paper
just published in Science by a team led by Oliver Pybus of Oxford University and Philippe
Lemey of the University of Leuven, in Belgium, they had a crucial role in the early
dissemination of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS

Compound sentence 1

RAILWAYS are one of humanitys most important inventions. But they can transport bad
things as well as good

Dr Pybus and Dr Lemey have been investigating the origin of this infection. Most cases are
caused by HIV-1, originally a chimpanzee virus. HIV-1, however, comes in several varieties, a
lot of which are rare, and only one of which, group M, has become pandemic.
Simple sentence 1
Dr Pybus and Dr Lemey have been investigating the origin of this infection

Simple sentence 2

Most cases are caused by HIV-1, originally a chimpanzee virus.

The two researchers wanted to understand why HIV-1 evolves fast. That has two useful
consequences for science. One is that family trees can be drawn up which show not only what
derives from what but also (because the rate of genetic change is reasonably constant) when
the various branches diverged. The other is that the virus genotype varies from place to place,
depending on when it first arrived somewhere. This means it is possible to track its spread in
some detailwhich Dr Pybus and Dr Lemey have now done.

Compound sentence 2
The two researchers wanted to understand why HIV-1 evolves fast.

They confirmed two suspicions. One is that the common ancestor of group M dates back to the
1920s. The other is that it originated in Kinshasa (then called Lopoldville) in what was the
Belgian Congo and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The analysis ruled out other
mooted points of origin, such as Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire.

Simple sentence 3
They confirmed two suspicions

Simple sentence 4
The analysis ruled out other mooted points f origin, such as Brazzaville and Pinte-Noire.

What happened before and after the origin of group M, though, is intriguing. The groups
ancestor seems to have come from Cameroon, whose chimpanzees have the simian virus
most similar to it. Some time before the first world war someone there (probably a hunter) was
infected, probably through close contact with chimp blood. (Transmission of pathogens from
animals to people in this way is also thought responsible for the current Ebola epidemic.) It
then, most likely, travelled south down the Sangha river, which was used to trade rubber and
ivory between Congo and Cameroon.
Arriving in Kinshasa was group Ms big break. Before Congos independence in 1960 that city
was at the centre of an extensive trade network. A mixture of river traffic (particularly along the
Congo and Kasai) and railways spread it all the way to Kisangani and Lubumbashi (see map).
But, though it became widespread, it does not seem to have been common. It is also possible
to extract from the family tree information about its prevalence in a population. The amount of
infection does not seem to increase faster than the human population until about 1960. Then,
group M took offfirst in Africa (although it remained undetected by medical science) and
afterwards in the rest of the world. That happened when Haitian professionals who had come
to help Congo after independence took it home, and it spread thence to the United States,
where it came to the attention of doctors in 1981.

Simple sentence 5

It is also possible to extract from the family tree information about its prevalence in a
population

What this geographical analysis does not address is why the rate of infection rose
simultaneously in several places around the time of Congos independence. In this, group M
differs from the next-most-widespread sort of HIV-1, group O. That also spread over the course
of the 20th century, and at a similar rate to group M until its 1960s growth spurtbut it did so in
west Africa rather than central Africa.
Two hypotheses have been advanced to explain the discrepancy. One is that group M threw up
a mutation which somehow changed its relationship with humanity, to its advantage. The other
is that something people started doing back then gave group M a particular leg-up.

Complex sentence 1
The other is that something people started doing back then gave group M a particular leg-up.

Dr Pybus and Dr Lemey believe it was the latter. They find it implausible that the necessary
mutation could have happened simultaneously across group Ms rangewhich their data
suggest would have to have been the case. Instead, they suspect the change was human. One
factor may have been the chaos that accompanied independence, which encouraged
impoverished women to turn to prostitution. Careless reuse of hypodermic needles at sexually
transmitted disease clinics is another possibility. The railways, though, did not seem to play a
role in this part of the story. In the wake of independence, the network broke down. Group M,
by contrast, went on from strength to strength.

Hong Kong protests

The Party v the people
The Communist Party faces its toughest challenge since Tiananmen. This time it must make wiser
decisions

Oct 4th 2014 | From the print edition

OF THE ten bloodiest conflicts in world history, two were world wars. Five of the other eight
took place or originated in China. The scale of the slaughter within a single country, and the
frequency with which the place has been bathed in blood, is hard for other nations to
comprehend. The Taiping revolt in the mid-19th century led to the deaths of more than 20m,
and a decade later conflict between Han Chinese and Muslims killed another 8m-12m. In the
20th century 20m-30m died under Mao Zedong: some murdered, most as a result of a famine
caused by brutality and incompetence.

Chinas Communist Party leaders are no doubt keen to hold on to power for its own
sake. But the countrys grim history also helps explain why they are so determined not
to give ground to the demonstrators in Hong Kong who want to replace the territorys
fake democracy with the real thing (see article). Xi Jinping, Chinas president, and his
colleagues believe that the partys control over the country is the only way of
guaranteeing its stability. They fear that if the party loosens its grip, the country will slip
towards disorder and disaster.

Complex sentence 2

Chinas Communist Party leaders are no doubt keen to hold on to power for its
own sake.

They are right that autocracy can keep a country stable in the short run. In the long run,
though, as Chinas own history shows, it cannot. The only guarantor of a stable country is a
people that is satisfied with its government. And in China, dissatisfaction with the Communist
Party is on the rise.
Bad omens
Hong Kongs Umbrella revolution, named after the protection the demonstrators carry against
police pepper-spray (as well as the sun and the rain), was triggered by a decision by China in
late August that candidates for the post of the territorys chief executive should be selected by
a committee stacked with Communist Party supporters. Protesters are calling for the party to
honour the promise of democracy that was made when the British transferred the territory to
China in 1997. Like so much in the territory, the protests are startlingly orderly. After a night of
battles with police, students collected the plastic bottles that littered the streets for recycling.
For some of the protesters, democracy is a matter of principle. Others, like middle-class people
across mainland China, are worried about housing, education and their own job prospects.
They want representation because they are unhappy with how they are governed. Whatever
their motivation, the protests present a troubling challenge for the Communist Party. They are
reminiscent not just of uprisings that have toppled dictators in recent years from Cairo to Kiev,
but also of the student protests in Tiananmen Square 25 years ago. The decision to shoot
those protesters succeeded in restoring order, but generated mistrust that still pervades the
worlds dealings with China, and Chinas with its own citizens.
In Hong Kong, the party is using a combination of communist and colonial tactics. Spokesmen
have accused the protesters of being political extremists and black hands manipulated by
foreign anti-China forces; demonstrators will reap what they have sown. Such language is
straight out of the partys well-thumbed lexicon of calumnies; similar words were used to
denigrate the protesters in Tiananmen. It reflects a long-standing unwillingness to engage with
democrats, whether in Hong Kong or anywhere else in China, and suggests that party leaders
see Hong Kong, an international city that has retained a remarkable degree of freedom since
the British handed it back to China, as just another part of China where critics can be
intimidated by accusing them of having shadowy ties with foreigners. Mr Xi, who has long been
closely involved with the partys Hong Kong policy, should know better.

At the same time, the party is resorting to the colonialists methods of managing little local
difficulties. Much as the Britishexcoriated by the Communist Partyused to buy the support
of tycoons to keep activism under wraps, Mr Xi held a meeting in Beijing with 70 of Hong
Kongs super-rich to ensure their support for his stance on democracy. The partys supporters
in Hong Kong argue that bringing business onside is good for stability, though the resentment
towards the tycoons on display in Hong Kongs streets suggests the opposite.
Yet the combination of exhortation, co-option and tear gas have so far failed to clear the
streets. Now the government is trying to wait the protesters out. But if Mr Xi believes that the
only way of ensuring stability is for the party to reassert its control, it remains possible that he
will authorise force. That would be a disaster for Hong Kong, and it would not solve Mr Xis
problem. For mainland China, too, is becoming restless.
Party leaders are doing their best to prevent mainlanders from finding out about the events in
Hong Kong (see article). Even so, the latest news from Hong Kongs streets will find ways of
getting to the mainland, and the way this drama plays out will shape the governments relations
with its people.
The difficulty for the Communist Party is that while there are few signs that people on the
mainland are hungering for full-blown democracy, frequent protests against local authorities
and widespread expressions of anger on social media suggest that there, too, many people
are dissatisfied with the way they are governed. Repression, co-option and force may succeed
in silencing the protesters in Hong Kong today, but there will be other demonstrations, in other
cities, soon enough.
A different sort of order
As Mr Xi has accumulated power, he has made it clear that he will not tolerate Western-style
democracy. Yet suppressing popular demands produces temporary stability at the cost of
occasional devastating upheavals. China needs to find a way of allowing its citizens to shape
their governance without resorting to protests that risk turning into a struggle for the nations
soul. Hong Kong, with its history of free expression and semi-detached relationship to the
mainland, is an ideal place for that experiment to begin. If Mr Xi were to grasp the chance, he
could do more for his country than all the emperors and party chiefs who have struggled to
maintain stability in that vast and violent country before him.

Parts of speech: summary

Content Words
Nouns
(pink)
ancestor
chimp

Adjectives
(blue)
intriguing
epidemic

Adverbs
(gray)
probably
particularly

Verbs
(green)
Arriving
See

Prepositions
(turquoise)
before
of

Conjunctions
(yellow)
for
then

Function Words
Pronouns
(purple)
it
they

Determiners
(light brown)
the
most