Word: lows
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...David Goldblatt asks in his definitive history of soccer, The Ball Is Round, "Is there any cultural practice more global than football?" It has more followers than any one religion and is more universal than any one language. Even Americans - some of whom still sniff at the sport's low-scoring games - are coming around: they are among the largest groups of fans to have already purchased tickets for South Africa. "Around half the planet watched the 2006 World Cup final," writes Goldblatt. "Three billion humans have never done anything simultaneously before." And they won't again until the summer...
...contrast across the Atlantic. There's no getting around the fact that the murder rate in America is much higher than in European countries. The implication is that every other crime is equally high, but I knew that was simply not the case. For example, [the U.S. has] comparatively low rates of sexual assault...
What about the U.S. tax system? How does it compare to Europe's? The U.S. tax rate is at the low end of the European scale. The big difference is we have no national VAT, or value-added tax. We rely on income and property tax for revenue, and our corporate tax is higher than that of most European nations. And yet our system is very progressive. Rich Americans pay a larger share of their income in taxes than the richest Europeans do. We have a low absolute level of taxation, but it's progressive by European standards...
...health care system really that much worse than Europe's? There are basically three numbers that always come up when people talk about the American health care system: average life expectancy, infant mortality and the mount of money we spend per head. Average life expectancy is at the low end of the European scale. We don't do well in terms of infant mortality, either. [And] we spend almost twice as much per person in health care expenditure. Fifteen percent of Americans don't have any insurance coverage. That's undeniable...
...America rather than Germany, where my type of journalism has little tradition," Wallraff tells TIME. Still, Wallraff's work has gained him notoriety in Germany, along with financial success. His book about the two years he spent posing as Turkish guest worker Ali Levent Sinirlioglu, The Lowest of the Low, sold more than 5 million copies and forced Germany to have a national discussion about its long-neglected Turkish minority. The dialogue led to a strengthening of the rights of temporary workers in the country and gave Germans of Turkish descent their first real foothold in politics...