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...factors are fueling the rise. The first is political. It's no coincidence that a record number of background checks occurred in November, the month Barack Obama was elected President and the Democrats took control of Congress. People grew anxious that the Obama Administration would ban semiautomatic weapons, so they rushed to buy guns before legislation could be passed. In a December survey by the research firm Southwick Associates, nearly 80% of active hunters and target shooters said they believed firearm purchases would "become more difficult" under the new Administration and a Democratic Congress. "Everybody is waiting for when...
...last Democratic President, Bill Clinton, put into law an assault-weapons ban in 1994. President George W. Bush allowed that ban to expire, but last month Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, said the Administration wanted to reinstate Clinton's ban. "The gun culture is hypersensitive," says Miles Hall, an Oklahoma City gun-shop owner. "If someone sneezes in Washington, we hear it and get nervous. There's a lot of anxiety out there...
...relentless march of development means that the people of Hong Kong are some of the most probing in the world when it comes to questions of cultural and personal identity. Issues of belonging are a theme of local art and letters to the point of tiresomeness, and barely a month goes by without an exhibition (or poetry reading or play) referencing some vanished heritage or collective memory. (See 10 things to do in Hong Kong...
...current government, headed by the former rebels, still indulges in periodic bouts of royal-bashing, often to paper over the increasingly apparent shortcomings of its own rule. As fuel lines in Kathmandu stretch more than 2 km and power cuts ravage the country, the Maoists announced last month their intention to form a commission to revisit the massacre eight years after it happened, tightening the screw on the lingering survivors of the 250-year-old monarchy. (See pictures of Nepal's Maoist camps...
...Those failings include the nine-month-old government's inability to provide much-needed development, from infrastructure to energy. This year, Kathmandu has suffered routine 17-hour power cuts, which have led to a drying up of foreign investment. Enduring fuel shortages have sent commodities' prices soaring, and the financial downturn has led thousands of overseas workers - whose remittances comprise some 16% of the national GDP - to return home unemployed. National security has also deteriorated, partly as a consequence of the government's failure to integrate the roughly 30,000-strong Maoist rebel army, still quartered in remote camps throughout...