Word: fitful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...disease is still killing people - in small numbers, with 140 deaths so far - and there have been confirmed deaths in victims who seemed perfectly healthy before the flu struck. The virus has also proven evolutionarily fit and very active, still spreading in the U.S. in the first week of June, when seasonal flu is normally a rarity. "This is a virus that appears to be evolving into a pandemic," said Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's interim director general for health, safety and the environment...
...raising the pandemic alert to phase 5 (out of six phases), there were 114 confirmed cases in just a handful of countries, along with an unknown - though suspected to be large - number of infections in Mexico. That wasn't a huge total, but H1N1 was clearly spreading and it fit the WHO's very specific criteria for the pandemic phase to change from level 4 to level 5: it was a novel influenza virus that was sustaining human-to-human spread in at least two different countries (in that case, the U.S. and Mexico). (See pictures from the thermal scanners...
...extent, this is the inevitable cooling down of an overly intense relationship. But in economics as in love, breaking up is hard to do. Bremmer recently co-authored the book The Fat Tail, which details the political risks facing the global economy. (Major, unlikely events that are difficult to fit into statistical models are known as fat tails.) He counts the U.S. relationship with China among the fattest of fat tails. American corporations may come to see China as a rival - meaning they'll be less likely to fight congressional crackdowns on trade. The U.S. investment banks that have been...
...environment, the military is said to have stepped up its influence in Pyongyang. A group of North Korean exiles has circulated a report saying that Kim has assured his generals that by 2012, the North will have achieved the status of a nuclear state, one with the ability to fit a warhead on a long-range missile...
...Political Act, a slim volume of essays that, in addition to being a kind of World According to Rick, argues that more travel might help keep the U.S. out of trouble overseas. "If every American were required to travel abroad before voting," he writes, "the U.S. would fit more comfortably into this ever-smaller planet...