Word: rating
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...popularity shows, Switzerland has yet to make its peace with immigrants, despite how central to the economy they have been and - with a falling birth rate and aging population - are still. Postwar Switzerland was built by Italian "guest workers," many of whom eventually won the right to settle, and today perhaps a quarter of the nation's workforce are non-Swiss...
...blood. Take tennis superstar Roger Federer: his dad was born South African. Exceptionalism is out of fashion these days. (Well, unless you're Chinese.) Global recession is a great leveler, its seismic shocks felt in big and small nations alike. Even Switzerland has not escaped the carnage. Its unemployment rate is at its highest for more than 11 years, and those fathomless repositories of Swiss-ness, the banks, are reeling from their exposure to sub-primes and credit markets. Switzerland's two biggest banks needed multibillion-dollar bailouts - UBS with public money, Credit Suisse with private - and, like bankers everywhere...
...city where 47% of adults are functionally illiterate and only 25% of high school freshmen make it to graduation, U of D is the chute through which bright young men can get to college. The school boasts a near perfect graduation rate and sends 99% of its graduates on to higher education. (In 2009 the one student who didn't go to college turned down a scholarship from the University of Michigan to sign a seven-figure contract with the Detroit Tigers.) (See pictures of Detroit's beautiful, horrible decline...
...though there was cheering and chants of "Fired up, ready to go!" this was no easy sell for Obama. The vote came the same week as Democrats lost the Virginia and New Jersey governors' mansions, and a day after the Labor Department reported a 26-year record unemployment rate of 10.2%. Preaching altruism in such a climate to politicians bent on self-preservation is tough. In the end Democrats lost 39 of their own - passing the bill 220-215 with a cushion of just two votes, one of those a Republican in a heavily Democratic Louisiana district. (Read "Understanding...
...target powerful players in business and politics and even members of his own family to establish a stronger legal foundation and investment climate. Of the nearly 150 cases it has handled, out of more than 30,000 registered complaints, the five-member team has secured a 100% conviction rate in the Corruption Court, making it one of the country's most feared institutions. (Read about SBY's efforts to woo investment to Indonesia...