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According to a person in the know, Feller’s question – including the bit about human rights directed at Hu – was fully translated into Chinese.

Hu, however, ignored that question in favor of the gentler one from his employee at Chinese television. As luck would have it, Hu was perfectly prepared for the question, and, in his reply, looked down to read statistics from his notes.

Reporters glanced at each other, puzzled over Hu’s ignoring of Feller’s question. During the interminable translation into Mandarin of Hu’s answer to the Chinese reporter’s question, Obama flashed a grin at Gibbs.

Hu, his forehead shining, had another plant waiting in the crowd, a reporter from the state-run Xinhua news agency. But before Hu could get that lifeline tossed his way, the microphone went to the American side, where Nichols demanded an answer to the human-rights question. This time, Hu couldn’t claim it was lost in translation.

“China is a developing country with a huge population and also a developing country in a crucial stage of reform,” he explained. “In this context, China still faces many challenges in economic and social development, and a lot still needs to be done in China in terms of human rights.”

No wonder Hu doesn’t like questions: He might have to give an honest answer.

La división de Sudán muestra el fracaso de los proyectos imperialistas (¿por qué no llamarlos así?) de las elites islámicas y árabes o arabizadas en numerosos países asiáticos y africanos, emprendidos después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Desde Marruecos hasta Siria y desde Argelia hasta Pakistán, los sucesivos gobernantes han querido encajar en el molde musulmán y –en menor medida– árabe a todos los grupos raciales y religiosos, ya se trate de bereberes, negros, tuaregs, caldeos, coptos, católicos, anglicanos, judíos o bahaíes. Desde los años 50, millones de personas han tenido que exiliarse (judíos magrebíes a Israel, cristianos libaneses y sirios a Francia, cristianos iraquíes a Estados Unidos), y otros millones más malviven sometidas a la discriminación y la violencia. Hubo un tiempo en que el porcentaje de cristianos en Túnez rondó el 50%; hoy, debido a las persecuciones, ha caído por debajo del 5%. En estas persecuciones coinciden tanto los aliados de Occidente (Marruecos o Egipto) como los hostiles (Libia o Irán).

El fracaso de este modelo de construcción nacional, basado en la asimilación forzada sobre la base de la raza y la religión, es absoluto, ya que los regímenes que la han practicado han conducido sus países no sólo a la inestabilidad y la dictadura, también a la pobreza: son inviables para los no musulmanes… y para los musulmanes. La prueba, a la vista de cualquier europeo, son los emigrantes procedentes del Magreb y de Pakistán.

“Basically, we are interested in understanding how much organic material – that is all the material produced by algae or fish in the water above – settles at the sea bed, and is either eaten by bacteria and degraded or is buried.

“The ratio that is either degraded or buried is the ultimate process determining what are the oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations of the oceans and the atmosphere, and this gives us an overall picture of how efficiently the sea can capture and sequester carbon in the global carbon cycle.”

While this has been studied in other parts of the ocean, such as the abyssal plain – the large flat area of the ocean that lies between 4.6km and 5.5km of depth – the role deep sea trenches play in the carbon cycle has until now remained largely unknown.

Professor Glud said: “Although these trenches cover just 2% of the ocean, we thought they might be disproportionately important, because it was likely that they would accumulate much more carbon because they would act as a trap, with more organic matter drifting to the bottom of them than in other parts of the ocean.”

He explained that preliminary data from his experiments suggested that this was the case.