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Author Emma Heathcote-James has spent nine years looking into real-life ghost stories, collecting tales from hundreds of people who claim to have seen evidence of an afterlife. The 27-year-old started her research at university and her thesis was turned into a BBC documentary that she re-wrote as her debut bestseller Seeing Angels, The book prompted so many people to write to her with their ghostly experiences that she used them for a second book After Death Communication, which has just been released in paperback.
Her new book They Walk Among Us describes seances with mediums who can summon solid ghosts out of thin air. While working on the book she invited a medium to her home in the Cotswolds to demonstrate a form. of ghostly communication where spirits take over the body. She explained: "This' medium came to my house, sat in my front room, and went into a trance. An old man's body just appeared over the top of the medium—he turned into an old man right in front of me. I was absolutely terrified at first—his hands became all arthritic and rheumatoid and his voice was old and staggered. The lights in my old cottage were going mad, going up and down by themselves but they had never done it before or since." Emma added: "The old man spoke to my boyfriend Paul and asked him to take the medium's pulse. Paul, an army doctor, felt his wrist and said I think he's dead'—but he wasn't, he had let the spirit take him over."
They Walk Among Us tells stories of people like Nick McGlynn, who was reunited with his wife Marie during a seance. She spoke to him through a medium hours after dying in hospital from multiple organ failure. Nick recalls the moment, halfway through the seance, when he heard his wife for the first time: "A fairly weak voice said,' Nick, Nick I' m home, I' m home', in the special way I used to announce my arrival to her when I came home." He says he told her he was happy for her, and that she thanked him for staying with her in hospital and told him: "I want you to have a ball. Go out and have a good time."
Emma says these paranormal experiences are "as natural as the sun and the rain" and since the book' s release last month she' s had hundreds more letters from readers. She adds: "It's such a huge subject, I feel like I am on the tip of a massive iceberg. "After the first book there were so many letters that the second one wrote itself."
One miraculous tale retold in After Death Communication is that of Dave Barber, who believes his dead grandmother saved him from drowning. Dave describes the day he almost died swimming with his son:" As neither my wife or I can swim we sat at the side of the pool, watching my son splash about, I decided to climb into the shallows and join in the fun. Almost immediately, I slipped, and fell." As he lay at the bottom of the pool Dave saw a "white mist" at the end, which got closer until he saw his dead grandmother emerge from it. "Her arms were outstretched towards me and she was dressed in a white silken gown," he says. "Suddenly, I was aware that my nine-year-old son had dived in to save me. He was banging my head on the floor of the pool in an effort to lift me. My grandmother, Amelia, was now very close and I knew that if I turned to her, I would die. I looked at my son and knew he needed me. Immediately, the pain returned, I felt myself rising through the water and I blacked-out."
Author Emma Heathcate-James has at least written ______ books telling real-life ghost stories.
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Which of the following country/countries drafted the proposal for changes to a draft UN resolution on Iraq？
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Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. At the end of each news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions.
听力原文： This is Stan Fielding reporting live from the outskirts of the capital city of Angola. Just 20 minutes ago, rebel forces launched the biggest offensive against the ruling government in the 18-month conflict here in this country. So far, peace negotiations have failed, and any resolution to quell the civil war appears bleak at this point. As you can probably hear behind me, rebel forces are also using heavy artillery to pound government strongholds around the city center. Rebel forces are closing in, and it's feared that they will be able to take the capital building before sunup where it is believed, many government officials are holding out. Since the beginning of the conflict, starvation, clean water, and adequate shelter have been the biggest daily obstacles facing the citizens of this torn country. It is believed that over 40,000 people, mostly children, have starved to death. Land mines have claimed countless other lives. Fortunately, no epidemics have broken out, but that is always a concern if this war lingers on.
What is the main target of the rebels in this latest attack ？
Back in 1985, Viktor Cherkashin was a senior KGB officer at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. In the shadowy world of espionage, he had a good professional reputation—a spy's spy. So when Robert Hanssen decided to switch sides, he sent a letter to Cherkashin offering to work for the Russians.
"I would not have contacted you," Hanssen wrote, "if it were not reported that you were held in esteem within your organization." Today, Cherkashin, 69, is a prosperous Moscow businessman. He owns a big house in the suburbs and drives a light blue 1986 Chevrolet, a trophy car in the streets of Moscow. "I've been on my pension now for 10 years," he said when NEWSWEEK contacted him by phone last week. "I'm in the private-security business." Cherkashin didn't want to discuss the Hanssen case. "I don't like to talk about other people's affairs," said the former spymaster.
He wasn't alone; no one in the Kremlin wanted to talk publicly about the exposure of Hanssen either. But that doesn't mean the Russians are bashful about spying on America. President Vladimir Putin, himself a former colonel in the now defunct KGB, has revived the fortunes of Russian intelligence agencies. Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who defected to Britain in 1985, estimates that the number of Russian spies now in the United States has reached "a record figure—more than 300".
In Putin-style. espionage, ideology is out, and so are most acts of subversion aimed at the United States. What Russia needs now is information: military, technological and economic. Putin wants quick growth for Russia's defense industry, sensing lucrative markets overseas. But he has written that it would take as many as 15 years for Russia to catch up with even the poorest countries in the West. "Scientific institutes won't be able to do it; it costs a lot of money," says Jolanta Darczewska, a Polish expert on Russia's intelligence establishment. "It's better to steal—cheaper and faster."
Like ninny other Russian agents in the United States, Hanssen apparently was mothballed by the Kremlin after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. His masters feared he might be exposed by a security breach in Moscow, and they were getting information of more immediate value from their mole in the CIA, Aldrich Ames, anyway. The intelligence agencies began a comeback under Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, another former spymaster. Then, a few weeks after Putin became Boris Yeltsin's prime minister in 1999, Hanssen was "reactivated". With espionage picking up again, his counterintelligence know-how may have given Moscow a map of America's defenses against spies.
Putin purports not to care about Washington's reaction to Russian spying. "During the Yeltsin years, they had instructions to avoid any scandals that would spoil relations with the West," says Gordievsky. "What Putin told [his foreign-intelligence agency] was, Don't worry. I'm not afraid of scandals'."
What Putin may be worried about, however, is moles in his own security service. Some of the information revealed in the FBI affidavit last week has touched off a wave of concern in Moscow. The Russians fear it could only have been obtained from a source within Russian intelligence, and that has led officials to suspect U.S. infiltration into the SVR. "If you look at the affidavit, they have documents from the archive of the SVR," said Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB general who says he brought Cherkashin to Washington. "Some of the references are from 1999." There were no Russian defectors from that time who could have provided the Americans with the information, officials say.
So are Washington and Moscow back to a spy-vs.-spy standoff？ Gordievsky, among others, thinks Russian intelligence may have misread the new Bush administration, predicting it would be more "pragmatic" and easier to work with than the Clinton White House. But so far, Washington has been no pushover. Bush advisers like
The first As an investment banker specializing in mergers and acquisitions, Francois yon Hurter spent a lot of time in airport lounges, where he'd often set aside the latest deal calculations in favor of a good mystery fiction read. So when he retired in 1998 after 25 years as a dealmaker, instead of joining legions of ex-bankers on extended vacations in exotic locales, yon Hurter committed himself and some hard-earned capital to his next business venture: He launched London-based Bitter Lemon Press, a publishing company specializing in reprinting in English mystery novels he'd grown to love.
These are not the usual hard-boiled Raymond Chandler imitations found in some bookstores and at airport lounges. The works, written originally in German, French, Spanish and Italian, offer social criticism and a slice of culture with the who-done-it, according to Von Hurter, who likened some of Bitter Lemon's titles to travel fiction. The books, translated into English for the first time, take readers to locales like Mexico City, Munich and Havana. "I'd always go to bookstores in countries where I can read" the language, 58-year old yon Hurter told Reuters while in New York this month to promote the company. In fact, he admits to making sure that, whenever possible, his U.S. flights went through Minneapolis, which has one of his favorite second-hand bookstores.
Von Hurter, born and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, and a graduate of University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school, is not the only Wall Street veteran financing Bitter Lemon Press. His brother Frederic yon Hurter, a former commodities trader at Cargill, the Minneapolis food giant, and Laurence Colchester, a former economist at Citibank, are partners. Though the trio speaks French, Greek, German and Italian, they employ translators to bring the books to life in English.
Francois yon Hurter would not detail how much of the groups's own money they put into Bitter Lemon. Bitter Lemon has published six books in Britain and has plans for five titles in the next six months or so as part of its launch in the United States. One such title, "Thumbprint", is a mystery written by Friedrich Glauser, who was born in Vienna in 1896 and has been referred to as a Swiss Simenon — a reference to the noted Belgian mystery writer known for his French detective Maigret. "Thumbprint", translated from German, has been one of the Bitter Lemon's most popular books, selling 5,000 copies. Other Bitter Lemon titles include Gunter Ohnemus ' "The Russian Passenger", the story of a cab driver who gets entangled with the Russian Mafia that has been translated from German, and "The Snowman" by Jorg Fauser, a German author born in 1944 who died in 1987. "Fauser was one of the romantic heroes of post-war German literature, a friend of Charles Bukowski ... he is now being rediscovered," news magazine Der Spiegel noted in July, responding to a biography of Fauser published this summer.
As a banker for First Boston, known today as Credit Suisse First Boston, and Morgan Stanley, Francois yon Hurter worked not only in New York but London and Saudi Arabia. Among other deals, he had a hand in Seagram Co Ltd.'s purchase of MCA Inc. and Coca-Cola Co.'s purchase of Columbia Pictures. And while the players are different, book publishing has some similarities to Wail Street's merger business. Like a company put up for sale, a book needs a specific market and needs to have potential for growth. "You have to put together a business plan ... negotiate with suppliers like printers, a sales force and distributors. You need to apply the same marketing savvy to decide how to position the book," he said.
What is different about this latest venture, though, is that the hours spent in the office seem to race by much more rapidly." In a way, the hardest part of the second career, is that it creates such enthusiasm that you tend never to mm off," he said. "The line between your priv
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