Word: bankes
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Last week, while the financial world was obsessing over stress tests for fragile banks, the environmental and agricultural worlds were watching the results of the Obama Administration's stress tests for renewable fuels. An outgrowth of the 2007 energy bill, the tests were supposed to document whether corn ethanol and other biofuels designed to replace fossil fuels would accelerate or alleviate global warming overall. But like the much-criticized bank checkups, these stress tests don't seem particularly stressful...
Unfortunately for the Pope, the present is often as difficult to navigate as the past. On Wednesday he will visit the West Bank city of Bethlehem, where he will both pray at Jesus' birthplace and devote his attention to the Palestinian people and the suffering of their struggle for a homeland under Israeli rule. Many hope the Pope might inject new hope into the stalled peace process. Others simply pray that his presence doesn't unintentionally make things worse...
...journal Science, researchers from Imperial College London, along with WHO staff and Mexican scientists, conclude that H1N1 is transmitted considerably easier than the regular seasonal flu and is about as deadly as the 1957 Asian flu, which killed about 2 million people worldwide. A World Bank study last year found that a pandemic of similar severity today might kill 14.2 million people around the world, and cut 2% from the global economy...
...Middle East. Many of the Palestinian refugees who fled or were forced from their homes in 1948 - never to be allowed back - were Christians. The flood of Palestinian refugees into Lebanon helped spark a civil war between Muslims and Christians there. And the ongoing occupation of the West Bank is strangling the life out of those Christian communities that are left. A U.N. report released a week ago said that the Palestinian West Bank town of Bethlehem - Christ's birthplace and a major stop on the Pope's visit - is now almost totally controlled by Israel. (Read a story about...
...that the Christians inside the Palestinian territories are leaving because the Islamists are harassing them. But Christians deny this. Instead, they blame the Israeli "security fence" enclosing Bethlehem and its nearby hilltop Christian villages which blocks the free movement of Palestinians, Christians and Muslims alike, inside the West Bank. Still, it is nowhere near as restrictive as the closure around Gaza...