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...paying their mortgage before their credit cards. Losing your house, after all, was seen as worse than losing the ability to spend more than what was in your bank account. But falling housing prices, loan-modification programs and restricted credit have changed the calculus of what debts get paid first for many Americans. What's more, the recent credit-card reforms might make it more attractive for more consumers to put their credit cards before their home loan...
...Greek debt crisis and bypassed by a host of dynamic, emerging nations. The E.U. is desperate for a magic potion to revitalize its creaking economy, but it may have to settle for something less dramatic. On Wednesday, the European Commission will unveil a 10-year plan outlining the first tentative steps toward forming a common economic policy. The "Europe 2020" strategy is being touted as a way to boost competitiveness and growth over the next decade. Skeptics, however, warn that it is no better than a placebo for the curmudgeon European patient...
...Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose studies were the first to dispute the claim that educational DVDs improve babies' language skills, noted the importance of Richert's findings in advancing our understanding of how babies learn - or, in this case, don't learn - language. "The novel thing here is that this is actually the first experiment in the real world using these products to robustly test their claims," he says...
...Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, which is analyzing the Chile tsunami data, says that precisely because the communities were so close to the epicenter, tsunami waves arrived "almost instantaneously." (Most accounts indicate they hit the shore less than 20 minutes after the first quake shock.) "It would have been virtually impossible to mobilize quickly enough to get out of harm's way," Lubchenco says - especially at 3:30 a.m., when the quake hit. "They didn't have the benefit of early warning in this case." (See the 10 deadliest earthquakes...
Ricardo Zapata, a disaster-evaluation chief for the Santiago-based Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), cites three levels of damage in the Chile quake. The first was the collapse of older, pre-1960 buildings, many of which were further damaged because they were constructed too close to one another. The second was the failure of newer buildings like Concepción's apartment high-rises, which, while not pancaking like poorly built structures did during Haiti's 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan. 12, in many cases tilted over and broke, because even the strongest foundations...