Word: pasts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...directed at bankers who earned huge bonuses by taking outsized risks with complex financial instruments, only to walk away scot-free when their bets went awry, plunging the world into crisis. Bonuses are just one aspect of the larger issue of moral hazard that has been raised over the past year, as governments and central banks have spent tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to rescue financial institutions whose recklessness in the name of short-term profiteering is at the root of the trouble. For all the recent signs of improvement, the financial situation is still far from...
...hating regime whose control over the country created a safe haven for a terrorist group that threatened the West. Even when they squabbled with Washington over Iraq, countries such as France and Germany stayed firm on Afghanistan. But public support has fallen over the years, and especially in the past 12 months. An August poll by French daily Le Figaro found that just 36% backed France's military's presence in Afghanistan. In July, a Forsa poll for German magazine Stern found that 61% of Germans want the country's military involvement to end. In Britain, which...
...less clear to the average voter than in Germany. Successive German leaders have sold the country's troop deployment as nation-building, not combat. But as the oil-tanker episode proved, mission creep is hard to avoid when the enemy starts attacking you. German involvement in Afghanistan was snuck "past people," Jurgen Trittin, the foreign policy spokesman for the Greens, recently argued. Now, with the Taliban moving into the once peaceful north, where most of Germany's troops are stationed, Germans have to face the fact that their military - a force that saw no action between the end of World...
...Venice to grab the attention of the world press. Michael Moore, whose Fahrenheit 9/11 is the top-grossing documentary of all time, shifted his focus to the financial meltdown in Capitalism: A Love Story. Provocative and wildly ambitious, it expands beyond the housing and banking crises of the past year into an epic of malfeasance: capital crimes on a national scale. With enough corporate villains to stock a hundred melodramas, who is the hero? The writer-director-star himself. There he is, attempting to make a citizen's arrest of AIG executives and parking an armored truck in front...
...hoaxes - most notably, one involving the journalist John Seigenthaler, whose Wikipedia entry falsely stated that he'd been a suspect in the John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations. They recently instituted a major change, imposing a layer of editorial control on entries about living people. In the past, only articles on high-profile subjects like Barack Obama were protected from anonymous revisions. Under the new plan, people can freely alter Wikipedia articles on, say, their local officials or company head - but those changes will become live only once they've been vetted by a Wikipedia administrator. "Few articles...