Word: importance
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...probably no coincidence that most of its cattle are fed on grass, not feed concocted from animal parts, which has been banned in several countries--including the U.S.--after being suspected of spreading mad cow. But falling prices in the U.S. could hurt Australian beef, which Americans import for its leaner content. In other words, it is all a mad-cow mess, and no one quite knows where it is going. "This happens in a global economy," says Sigalla, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, with a sigh. In the meantime, tell your kids to keep those...
...longer lending at all to companies where we can't understand what's going on," vows a top credit officer at one big Italian bank. But small and mid-sized firms will be hit too. "For family firms that need more capital to grow, this will be an important problem," worries Guido Corbetta, a professor at Bocconi University in Milan. Prosecutors probing the now-bankrupt Parmalat are increasingly focusing on the roles Italian and U.S. banks may have played in the affair. One potential winner: the Italian stock market. Family businesses have traditionally shunned it, but Corbetta believes firms with...
...sense, Playboy was the anti-New Yorker. It was the Chicagoan. Playboy was founded at about the time the Second City was becoming the Third, after Los Angeles, in population and cultural import. But from the first, home-town boy Hef pursued Chicago writers and artists, perhaps because he could hustle them personally. Nelson Algren, Ben Hecht, Silverstein, LeRoy Neiman, and later David Mamet, gave Playboy a Midwestern voice to go with its middle-American notion of pulchritude...
...familiar three kings of Christmas legend (later piety gave them names, ages, races and crowns), but rather an unspecified number of astrologers, perhaps from Babylon. Even in that guise, some critics suggest, their existence is questionable, possibly merely a preaching device used by the evangelist to suggest the import and universality of the astonishing event: God become man. --TIME...
...Chinese Puzzle The Bush Administration is pursuing an odd trade policy toward China, as the latest import quotas show...