Word: fret
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...Noriega, they reject charges of a policy vacuum. "We always envisioned continually escalating economic pressure," says a senior Administration official. "We have avoided doing anything dramatic because we don't want to cause permanent damage to the Panamanian economy." Yet as U.S. banks contemplate pulling out of Panama, pessimists fret that Panama's service economy is being ravaged beyond repair; optimists predict that it will take a decade to restore investors' confidence in the country. Grouses a Panamanian official: "The American strategy has all the subtlety of a bull crashing through a glass door...
...frenzy intensified in January, when the airlines began to offer "triple mileage" -- three miles' credit for every mile flown. Suddenly flyers could look forward to earning that dream vacation to Hawaii in one-third the time. Forced to match one another to stay competitive, the airlines fret that the frequent-flyer programs have spun out of control. The number of passengers participating has surged from 4 million in 1983 to 8 million now. They hold nearly 30 million memberships in frequent-flyer plans, since many passengers sign with more than one airline...
Though Japan may be one of the world's most financially successful nations, its citizens worry about their futures as if they were impoverished. They fret over high tuition bills for their children, over the cost of buying a new house and especially over having enough money once they retire. Corporate pensions have nearly risen to the level of other industrial nations, but most Japanese consider such benefits inadequate. When Matsuoka reaches Honda's mandatory retirement age of 60, for example, he can expect a company pension of about $1,500 a month (with no cost of living increases...
Still, as far back as the late 1890s, Swedish Chemist Svante Arrhenius had begun to fret that the massive burning of coal during the Industrial Revolution, which pumped unprecedented amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, might be too much of a good thing. Arrhenius made the startling prediction that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would eventually lead to a 9 degrees F warming of the globe. Conversely, he suggested, glacial periods might be caused by diminished levels of the gas. His contemporaries scoffed. Arrhenius, however, was exactly right. In his time, the CO2 concentration was about 280 to 290 parts...
...armed soldiers of the Sandinista People's Army. Now a homegrown peace plan hatched in the capitals of Central America has upstaged the war. Even some contra civilian leaders have caught peace fever, declaring their intention to re-enter politics in Nicaragua and leave those in fatigues to fret about the future of the struggle. "This could be it," concedes a senior contra official in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. "If we are cut off by Washington now, we may be finished for good...