Word: rates
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...actually assign a lot of blame for our recent troubles on a lack of interest-rate caps - that is, on the absence of strict usury laws. Why? Almost every state had usury laws in the 1920s, and they were circumvented one by one. Prohibitions against excessive interest started to disappear [South Dakota, for instance, loosened its laws in 1980], and once they did, the credit-card companies recognized a wonderful opportunity. They could charge as much as the market would bear, claiming that they had to charge more for bad credit risks. You can argue that's the democratization...
...Angeles was stunned at the news. L.A. Police Department chief William Bratton was stepping down, less than halfway through his second term, to take a job in the private sector. Even Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who Bratton has partnered with so successfully to lower the city's crime rate, only learned of Bratton's plans during a midnight phone call the day before the formal announcement. Bratton explained that he had actually made the decision several weeks before and had planned to tell the mayor at a meeting on Wednesday; but, he says the Los Angeles Times forced his hand...
...effective discipline, social-skills-training groups for teens, both the parent- and teen-focused group interventions, or no group treatment at all. Overall, the parent-focused group was most effective, leading to reductions in teen smoking and misbehavior at school. The teen-focused group, by contrast, significantly increased participants' rate of aggressive behavior and smoking; in the combination group, kids showed no improvement, presumably because the exposure to other teens canceled out the positive effect of the parents...
...they have a long and detailed fossil record. Going back to the Jurassic period, researchers analyzed when each genus - a taxonomic category just above species - disappeared, and whether relatives vanished at the same time. On average they found that closely related groups of clams went extinct together at a rate that was more often than expected by blind chance - generally those groups of species were confined to a fairly small geographic area. "Extinctions tend to be clustered, which means the effects tend to be worse than what you might expect from random," says Roy. "That's true for mass extinctions...
...will provide needed ammunition for modern-day conservationists as well. We're in the middle of what some scientists have begun to call the sixth great extinction event, this one caused almost entirely by human beings. Human expansion, hunting, deforestation and ultimately climate change are eliminating species at a rate up to 1,000 times higher than the evolutionary norm. Species like the Yangtze River dolphin and the golden toad have disappeared, while a range of animals - from the Sumatran tiger to the silky Sifaka lemur of Madagascar are on the brink...