Word: doomsday
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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LONGYEARBYEN, NORWAY "Doomsday" vault holding millions of crop seeds opens...
...ensure that an agricultural doomsday never comes, Fowler and his colleagues have organized the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an international seed bank built into a mountain on a Norwegian island in the Arctic. A Fort Knox for seeds, the vault will be a backup for the backups and will eventually be expanded to include genetic samples of every crop on the planet. The first shipments, from more than 36 African nations, arrived at the end of January, and there will be room for as many as 4.5 million samples once the facility opens Feb. 26. The specimens will be kept...
...That's quite a turnaround from the doomsday predictions made in the early '90s. It was less than two decades ago that the country's crime wizards were warning of a unprecedented, bloody spike as a super-predator generation - kids armed with equally menacing weapons and attitudes - inflamed gang and drug wars; murders hit over 2,000 in New York and nearly 1,000 in Chicago during the early 1990s. Many theories for the decline over the past decade and more have been floated; from the Freakonomics suggestion that legalizing abortion effectively wiped out a population of would-be criminals...
...Doomsday predictions, of course, have long been a staple of Middle East commentary. Every negotiation seems to be the "last chance" for peace. Every crisis seems to threaten the outbreak of a major war, if not the great apocalypse. But there's reason to pay attention to the warnings this time. The 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel planted the seed for resolving the core of the conflict: the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Arab territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. But if the Annapolis conference fails...
...grim. The U.S. housing slump is worsening. Banking giants such as Merrill Lynch and Citigroup are posting record losses. The U.S. dollar is getting pounded by the British pound - and virtually every other currency. Oil has run up as high as $98 per bbl., and gold - the traditional doomsday investment - has topped $800, its highest level since the early 1980s...