Word: hot
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...live along Montana's Yellowstone River are downstream from a simmering caldera, a geologic hot spot that has become especially active recently. Indeed, Yellowstone National Park contains the floor of a gigantic volcanic cauldron, one that rises and sinks with the forces that lie beneath - hence the picturesque geysers and steam holes. But a wave of recent earthquake activity is raising fears that have their origins 642,000 years ago, when a Yellowstone "supervolcano" exploded so violently that it created the caldera itself. Today, such an explosion - 1,000 times more powerful than the explosion of Mount St. Helens...
...United States Geological Survey (USGS) said possible hazards could include hydrothermal explosions, when steam breaks through the surface and forms a crater. That has happened 26 times in the park's 127 years of record-keeping. The USGS discounted chances for cataclysmic eruption of the caldera, noting that the hot, active magma chamber below Yellowstone has turned into "largely crystallized mush." But the same study also said: "Depending on the nature and magnitude of a particular hazardous event and the particular time and season when it might occur, 70,000 to more than 100,000 persons could be affected...
...clouds of steam over a subzero, snowy alpine landscape, where bison and elk find warm patches of open ground to browse. We who live here, it has been said, do so at the mercy of geology. In much of the West, with its long seismic faults and Yellowstone-centered hot spots, it is for humans a sublimely tenuous coexistence with the earth's fickle tectonic temperaments...
...surprisingly, as economic conditions worsened in 2008, NAFTA became a hot issue during the U.S. Presidential campaign again. Democratic candidates Senators Hillary Clinton - whose husband signed the treaty in 1993 - and Barack Obama both blamed NAFTA for lost American manufacturing jobs and suggested that terms might be renegotiated to include higher labor and environmental standards. The idea would be to stem the "race to the bottom" among companies seeking the cheapest costs of doing business, ultimately encouraging them to keep jobs in place...
...hot war in Gaza was not how Israel was supposed to appear on the strategic agenda of Barack Obama when he takes office in January. Its leaders had hoped to keep the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the back burner of the new Administration, which Israel hopes will make Iran's nuclear program its overriding priority in the Middle East. Instead, the weekend bloodbath in Gaza - the deadliest since Israel occupied the territory in 1967 - casts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an urgent crisis demanding a response from Washington. It also highlights the failure of the Bush Administration's and Israel...