Word: commoner
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...course, as institutions emerging from the worst of the credit crisis, the banks have little more than that in common. Famous for flogging mortgages worth 125% of a property's value, Newcastle-based Northern Rock was caught with its pants down when the wholesale markets it relied on to fund those loans froze in 2007. With unemployment rising and house prices still on the wane, the bank's impairment charges for soured loans tripled, to $1 billion in the first half of this year vs. the same period in 2008. Just as worrying: a shade under 4% of its home...
...order to receive federal reimbursement for the subsidy consumers get for trading in their cars, dealers must first destroy the engine. One common method is to drain the car's oil and flood the engine with sodium silicate, or liquid glass. Dealers then turn the car on and rev the engine to let the solution harden. In just a few minutes, the car becomes inoperable. (Read "How Bad Are Auto Sales? 10 Questions and Answers...
...phones weren't enough. Google needed its own operating system that would not only power the new generation of smartbooks and other mobile Internet devices but also keep them on the wide-open Google Web. That's why it announced the Chrome operating system last month. (I think the common wisdom - that this was a move aimed mainly at the king of operating systems, Microsoft - is flat-out wrong. Getting into mobile operating systems is a defensive move for Google, not an offensive one.) (Watch TIME's video about the Palm Pre vs. the iPhone...
...headline on Bobby Ghosh's article, "Can we be friends?" is perhaps going too far [July 13]. Friendship cannot spring up without common understanding and common interests. The improvement in relationships between Russia and the U.S. should be fostered on both sides; let us hope that Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev, two young and charismatic leaders, honestly face this tough challenge. Ignacio O'Dogherty, MADRID...
...Tehran are regularly surprised by the level of candor and outright griping on the part of the citizenry. Taxi cabs in particular are hotbeds of sedition, roving confessional booths for those with grievances against the regime. With the crackdown ratcheting up by the day, such conversations became less common, taxi rides turned more subdued. Citizens fell back on the old Persian habits of evasion and mistrust. For all of the bravery witnessed in the gathering crowds, many us felt compelled to run scared when we were by ourselves. It just wasn't worth it, not yet, to defy this government...