Word: partly
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...worst of the bunch, with its ratio likely to top 200%. Just as risky private-sector indebtedness caused the Great Recession, government debt, if not addressed, threatens to stall economic growth and spark renewed waves of confidence crises in global financial markets. "Attention has shifted to the second part of the story, to the impact [of the financial crisis] on government balance sheets," says David Beers, global head of sovereign ratings at Standard & Poor's in London. That has "intensified the pressure that was already there to start a process of repair...
...this grant has been provided by the Chinese government, whose high-level interest in the project is easy to understand. Panthera tigris amoyensis is the progenitor of all modern tigers and the only subspecies unique to China. "You have a culture that reveres the tiger," says Tilson. "It's part of their fabric." By pulling a Chinese subspecies from the brink of extinction, China seeks not only to overturn an appalling record on conservation and the environment but also to gain a powerful new icon of national resurgence - not a cuddly giant panda this time but a formidable predator that...
...Tigers have never before been reintroduced to the wild. This is partly because scarce conservation resources are usually devoted to what Tilson calls "a failed strategy": protecting what few tiger habitats remain. "There needs to be a new paradigm," says Tilson. His answer? "Let's create wildernesses, as opposed to trying to protect the little fragments that are left." Hopes for resurrecting the South China subspecies rest largely on a captive population of 67 tigers, held in zoos across China. It will be challenging. Derived from just six animals - two male, four female - caught between 1958 and 1970, they...
...Beijing disputes this - none. During Mao Zedong's time they were considered a pest and extermination campaigns were launched against them. Also taking a toll were loss of habitat, declining prey numbers and, as the economy took off, growing demand from traditional Chinese medicine for every part of the animal: whiskers, penis, bone, even feces...
...Once the wilderness is complete, the tricky part begins: breeding the tigers to inhabit it. The last remaining South China tigers could die out within a few generations unless their genes are supplemented with those from other subspecies. It is not an image China's propagandists will want to project: a captive population of "Chinese" tigers, enfeebled by decades of inbreeding and reliant on genes from, say, a Vietnamese subspecies before they can survive in the wild. But ultimately, says Tilson, the Chinese will have to accept this hybridization "because it's already been done and they have no other...