The judiciary system, which has just acquired its independence as a branch of the government, is quickly shedding elements of its independence: courts often make openly lawless decisions. Courts fulfill the political orders of the administration.

The alliance of the human rights movement and the environmental movement opens up new promising prospects for the human rights movement. By the same token, such an alliance will serve as a new step in the creation of civil society in Russia. The first successful attempt of such a union was made in St. Petersburg in year 2000 with the creation and registration of the inter-regional coalition “Environment and Human Rights”. The coalition is developing its branches in the regions.

Among possible specific directions of action are the following:

·the creation of a coordinating network for environmental human rights organizations;

·attracting professional lawyers to work in environmental human rights organizations;

·providing urgent legal assistance to persecuted environmental activists;

·creation of environmental human rights organizations based on existing environmental and human rights groups in several regions of the country;

·court trials against lawless actions of the government (e.g., in the cases when environmental human rights organizations are not allowed to register);

·publishing a new magazine “Environment and Human Rights”;

·publishing of environmental human rights literature;

·training new lawyers specializing in environmental human rights protection.

All of the above will become possible only if the appropriate material support is provided by those foundations interested in the protection of human rights and creation of civil society in Russia.

TEXT 9

OUR HEALTH

Throughout the world, the prevalence of particular diseases and other threats to human health depend largely on local climate. Extreme temperatures can directly cause the loss of life. Moreover, several serious diseases only appear in warm areas. Finally, warm temperatures can increase air and water pollution, which in turn make harm to human health.

The most direct effect of climate change would be the impacts of hotter temperatures themselves. Extremely hot temperatures increase the number of people who die on a given day for many reasons: people with heart problems are vulnerable because one’s cardiovascular system must work harder to keep the

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body cool during hot weather. Heat exhaustion and some respiratory problems increase.

Higher air temperatures also increase the concentration of ozone at ground level. The natural layer of ozone in the upper atmosphere blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation from reaching the earth's surface; but in the lower atmosphere, ozone is a harmful pollutant. Ozone damages lung tissue, and causes particular problems for people with asthma and other lung diseases. Even modest exposure to ozone can cause healthy individuals to experience chest pains, nausea, and pulmonary congestion. In much of the nation, a warming of four degrees (F) could increase ozone concentrations by about 5 percent.

Warmer temperatures may decrease the number of people who die each year from cold weather. However, in the United States, only 1000 people die from the cold each year, while twice that many die from the heat. Global warming is unlikely to reduce either of these situations. Finally, deaths due to the heat are more sensitive to temperature changes than deaths due to the cold; the difference between –20 °F and –15 °F, for example, has a much smaller impact than an increase from 95 °F to 100 °F.

Global warming may also increase the risk of some infectious diseases, particularly those diseases that only appear in warm areas. Diseases that are spread by mosquitoes and other insects could become more prevalent if warmer temperatures enabled those insects to become established farther north.

In spite of these risks, increased mortality is not an inevitable consequence of global warming. Malaria, for example, is rare in the United States even in warmer regions where the mosquito that transmits the disease is found, because this nation has the ability to rapidly identify and contain outbreaks when they appear. Heat-related deaths can be prevented by emergency measures to move vulnerable people to air-conditioned buildings, and by reducing the emissions of photochemical oxidants which cause ground-level ozone. Many of the impacts of climate change on health could be avoided through the maintenance of strong public health programs to monitor, quarantine, and treat the spread of infectious diseases and respond to other health emergencies as they occur. Although air-conditioning and public health programs may impose additional costs on the public and private sectors, they would often be preferable to the impacts on human health that would otherwise occur.

TEXT 10

CHALLENGES OF LEADERSHIP IN TEAMS

Within the global marketplace many successful companies have moved away from command and control management systems that rely on top-down decision making and functionally driven problem solving. Taking the place of these traditional

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methods of operation are flatter, team-based organizations designed to integrate people with diverse backgrounds and different skill sets into a culture that emphasizes cross-functional cooperation and personal responsibility for effective group participation. These team roles require unique leadership abilities that are expressed in the development of superior listening skills, the acquisition of coaching techniques, and the ability to apply the principles of mind-set management to create a workforce that is highly motivated and self-empowered.

By reconfiguring the workforce in this way, leading companies have recognized the benefits of improving effective response time to clients, innovating within product lines, and creating a culture that fosters cross-functional decision making and shared strategic problem solving. Classic leadership activity, consisting of telling people what to do and how to do it, has been replaced by senior executives who hone their abilities to orchestrate and facilitate significant and meaningful team-based activities.

Transforming organizations from a classic leadership organization to a shared leadership organization is predicated upon ‘recognition of the importance of empowering team members by placing responsibility for performance at the locus of the team’s productive activities’. Team leadership includes creating an environment that fosters the evolution of a set of appropriate behavioral patterns among team members and encourages assumption of personal responsibility, effective communications, and development of necessary skill sets.

Managers today are increasingly engaged in fact-based analysis of strategic plans for expanding, redesigning, or contracting their firms’ supply chains. They may be motivated by a need to efficiently replenish growing markets for the firm’s products, to consolidate manufacturing and distribution operations after a major acquisition, or to close down underutilized physical facilities. They seek supply chain network optimization models to help them unravel the complex interactions and ripple effects that make strategic planning exercises difficult and important. Very recently, extended models have been developed and applied that integrate supply chain decisions with those concerned with demand management. The goal is to identify plans that maximize net revenues by varying product mix, rather than merely seeking plans that minimize the total supply chain costs of meeting fixed demand.

By constructing and optimizing “what if” scenarios about the firm’s future, supply chain network optimization models serve to refine and extend managerial intuition about major strategic decisions. In a typical supply chain study, 50 scenarios or more may be optimized and their results reviewed before managers have confidence in the courses of action to pursue. The state-of-the-art is to construct and optimize deterministic models that treat each scenario as a description of the firm’s future that will occur with certainty.

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