Word: flashpoint
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...latest flashpoint in the global financial crisis, Iceland is nursing a familiar sort of economic pain in a typically cool way. Over the past two years, the country's banks enjoyed extraordinary growth by borrowing heavily on international capital markets, leading Iceland to rack up a $2.7 billion current-account deficit, equivalent to 16% of its GDP; the comparable figure even in the notoriously indebted U.S. is only 5%. In January banks worldwide clamped down on loans in response to the global credit crunch, and investors began to worry that Icelandic banks had leveraged themselves too aggressively. Rumors swirled that...
...flashpoint in six decades of conflict has been Kashmir, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan. For years Pakistan had actively supported a guerrilla insurgency against the Indian authorities, but Islamabad seems to have bent to U.S. pressure and called off the biggest Pakistan-sponsored Kashmir jihadist groups. Pakistani officials long suspected of meddling in Kashmir have lately been kept busy with problems closer to home, such as the insurgencies along the the border with Afghanistan and elsewhere in Pakistan...
...more recent flashpoint is at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), where agency director General Michael Hayden has launched an investigation of his agency's own IG office, headed by John Helgerson. The move is unprecedented and provoked criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for jeopardizing the independence of the IG - by intimidating any staff that might want to report misgivings - and interfering with its oversight function. In a letter urging Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, to order Hayden to cease his inquiry, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Select Intelligence Committee, said that...
Even without these new sectarian elements, clashes between Shi'a factions have made Diwaniyah a recent flashpoint in Iraq even as other areas, most notably cities in Anbar Province, have calmed down. The local government and security forces of Diwaniyah are largely controlled by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) and its armed wing, the Badr Corps, who are challenged almost daily in the streets by members of the rival Jaish al Mahdi, the militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al Sadr. (The SIIC was formerly known as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, with the initials SCIRI.) While...
...billion in Russian companies last year. But some, of course, has been decidedly noticed. The country's investments in Sudan, which increased in early July when China National Petroleum Corp. said it would spend an additional $25 million developing an offshore field there, have become a global flashpoint given the carnage the Khartoum government has allowed to continue in Darfur...