Word: almost
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...total global GDP last year; China just 6.4%. Chinese consumption, in other words, is growing - but is still insufficient to lift the world's advanced economies out of recession. Consumer spending drives less than 40% of China's GDP; in the U.S. before the bust, the consumer accounted for almost 70%. With American shoppers now on the sidelines - the U.S. savings rate has soared from zero to nearly 7% in the past nine months as consumers have closed their wallets - the world desperately needs someone to step into that void. (Read "China Won't Ride to World's Economic Rescue...
...right parties are attracting applause in many corners of Europe these days. Almost a million British voters honked their horns for the BNP in June's European elections, giving the party its first two seats in the European Parliament and a corresponding boost to legitimacy and funding. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders' Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom, PVV) elbowed aside centrist rivals to grab second place in the Netherlands' Euro poll. Around Europe a ragbag of extremist parties, as varied as the countries that produced them yet united by a vehement nationalism that singles out minority groups...
...Peter Balkenende's conservative coalition. The PVV leader proposes going further by halting all immigration from non-Western countries, banning the Koran and deporting any Muslim who breaks the law. His rhetoric recalls Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician gunned down in 2002, days before an election that would almost certainly have given him a parliamentary platform to air his hard-line views on immigration. Fortuyn's friend and compatriot Theo van Gogh was working on a film about Fortuyn's assassination when he himself was murdered in 2004. His killer, a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent angered by Submission...
...Fish and Wildlife Conservation (FWC) commissioner Ron Bergeron is looking for the worst invasive menace to threaten the River of Grass since sugarcane and the Army Corps of Engineers. "They like to sneak onto islands like this one," says Bergeron, 65, a self-described "glades cracker" who has spent almost as much of his life out here as most alligators have. "They know birds and animals take refuge on them...
Bergeron is a smart gladesman. He pulls up to the tree-covered hummock, and almost as soon as herpetologists Shawn Heflick and Greg Graziani hop off the airboat armed with snake hooks, they find a 10-foot Burmese python slithering through the mud. Graziani swoops down and grabs the angry serpent's tail while Heflick goes for the other end. After a brief struggle, during which Heflick gets his hand bloodied by a sharp snake tooth, they pull the python's head, with its camouflage-like design, into their clutches. "It was trying to cool off deep down there...