Word: dormant
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...maybe not. In the past few weeks, another rival to the dollar - created in 1969 but dormant for most of the time since - has made a spectacular re-entry onto the world scene. It goes by the ungainly name of special drawing right (SDR), and it is the currency not of some foreign rival but of the Washington-based and traditionally U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF). It isn't even really its own currency, since it derives its value from a "basket" that contains dollars, euros, yen and pounds. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
...seen. "Right now, everybody is upset because UBS messed up," says Georg Lutz, a political scientist at Lausanne's Foundation for Research in Social Sciences. But Lutz points out that the Swiss had rebounded from scandals and corporate downfalls before, such as the controversy in the 1990s surrounding the dormant Holocaust bank accounts, or the collapse, in 2001, of Switzerland's former national airline. "At that time we were upset too, but we got over it and moved on," Lutz says. "So in the end the UBS fiasco will not have a lasting negative effect on the national psyche...
...bottles and flower leis litter the crunchy black rock at the feet of an elderly woman in a bright red mumu dress singing an ancient mele. Her voice echoes to the bottom of the deep and dormant Halemaumau Crater, the sacred centerpiece of the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and the home of Pele, the feared and revered Hawaiian volcano goddess (gin being her favorite, fiery drink). Tourists in shorts stop and stare at the scene, their heads bowed down in geological reverence. (See pictures of volcanoes...
...Fowler calls it, the "Noah's ark of seeds." The vault was built on the far northern Norwegian island of Longyearbyen, where the Arctic cold helps keeps the seeds viable, in case the electricity that powers the vault's cold storage should ever go. (Seeds can remain dormant but alive for centuries if they're kept cool and dry.) The location isn't an accident - should something truly horrific happen, from extreme climate change to nuclear war, remote Svalbard should remain protected, capable of rebooting global agriculture. "This is an insurance policy we know we need," says Fowler...
...Still, FOCA is proving to be the perfect political issue for anti-abortion advocates - and for congressional Republicans, who have taken up the cry as well. Unless and until FOCA is voted on by Congress, they can invoke it as a looming threat. And the longer it remains a dormant issue, the more credit they can take for their own "proactive" efforts to "defeat FOCA," as a letter from House Republicans to Cardinal Rigali on Tuesday...