Word: rocks
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...found in the 1957 flu epidemic. Like H1N1, that flu began early in the year on foreign soil and was relatively quiet in the summer. Once school reconvened, however, it surged. As the disease peaked in October - between the launch of Sputnik and the release of the movie Jailhouse Rock - 43% of Manhattan students and 11% of New York City teachers reported absent from school in a single day. By the time it dissipated, about 1 in 4 Americans had taken ill from the disease, though the vast majority recovered without any lasting harm, according to a study...
...world's banking system in recent months that the words chosen by bank bosses to convey the health of their business have lost all relative meaning. Victor Blank, chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, saw "exciting prospects for the group" in its first-half results unveiled Wednesday, Aug. 5. Northern Rock "is making progress," chief executive Gary Hoffman said of the British bank's half-year results announced a day earlier. "Our first-half performance," Barclays boss John Varley reckoned the day before that, was "a good start." At HSBC, chief exec Michael Geoghegan said Monday, the first six months...
...other words, improvement means different things to different bank bosses. Mounting bad debt at Lloyds drove it to a $6.8 billion loss in the first half of this year, some distance from the $4.8 billion profit recorded in the same six months of 2008. Northern Rock, nationalized early last year after a run on its deposits in 2007, slumped to a pretax loss of $1.2 billion in the first half, far worse than the $984 million shortfall recorded in the same period of 2008. A stellar six months at the investment-banking unit of London-based HSBC, meanwhile, helped prop...
...course, as institutions emerging from the worst of the credit crisis, the banks have little more than that in common. Famous for flogging mortgages worth 125% of a property's value, Newcastle-based Northern Rock was caught with its pants down when the wholesale markets it relied on to fund those loans froze in 2007. With unemployment rising and house prices still on the wane, the bank's impairment charges for soured loans tripled, to $1 billion in the first half of this year vs. the same period in 2008. Just as worrying: a shade under 4% of its home...
...legendary CBGB & OMFUG—"Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers"—at Bowery and Bleecker Streets. The club was founded in 1973, and soon left behind its folksy name to become the home of a new kind of music, called punk rock, that was played in many clubs near Bowery Street by bands like New York natives The Ramones. It closed...