Word: ironic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Public Health--have documented a relationship between obesity and poverty among specific and varied segments of the homeless population. These studies have found a prevalence of imbalanced, fast food-dependent diets among homeless children and higher fat intake and prevalence of obesity--along with significant nutritional deficiency in iron, magnesium, zinc, folic acid, and calcium--among a sample of single homeless mothers. In general, homeless study participants had high-fat diets and high serum cholesterol levels, making them more likely to be obese...
...Yangs' collision course with history continued. The family home in Liuyang was pulled down in the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s: the peasants wanted the wooden beams for their backyard iron smelters, which Mao thought would transform China into an industrial power. Most of the iron was worthless, and the neglect of agriculture led to the worst famine of the century, in which more than 20 million people starved to death. Peiyuan's "first mother"--his father's first wife--died of hunger in 1962, but the twins' mother--the third wife--survived and held together what...
...irony of insurance is that mostly it protects against things we can control but not against things we can't control. Whoops! Burn down the manse with an unattended iron, and the typical policy covers you. But if heavy rain overwhelms a storm sewer that backs up into your home or business and destroys all, well, sorry. Claims adjusters are now delivering that message to thousands of people, including the Kadlecs, trying to wring out Hurricane Floyd from their carpets...
When Lou Gerstner, IBM's iron-willed CEO, makes a decision, he usually sticks by it. So how was it that 10 days ago he made an abrupt about-face, scaling back a change to the company's retirement plan that was supposed to save $200 million annually? And did Gerstner realize he was feeding a nationwide workplace riot among baby boomers, who are convinced their nest eggs are being plundered...
...communist system, after all, may be riddled with problems that make its collapse inevitable, but unemployment has never been one of them. Mao Zedong's promise of the "iron rice bowl" was the traditional communist guarantee of full employment. However decrepit the economy might be, everyone would always have a job, no matter how economically redundant. You pretend to work and we pretend to pay you. And yet on Friday, even as portraits of Mao were driven through the streets of Beijing, 100 million Chinese face the prospect of joblessness with no social safety...