Word: serious
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...Rome native was looking up at the giant bronze Garibaldi. "He was a man of action," said Bruno Ambrosi dei Magistris, a retired paint company owner, sporting a white moustache and aviator sunglasses. "Sure we know that Italians tend to be self-centered. But when called to do something serious, we respond." In Italy, the iconography of Garibaldi - a dashing figure with piercing eyes and a mane of hair - has been massaged by virtually every generation since the 1815-70 Risorgimento established the modern country we know today. Mussolini cited Garibaldi's nationalist determination as the precursor of fascism, while...
...startling number testifies to the buoyancy of equity markets in China - which many analysts believe are classic, overvalued bubbles, destined at some point to crash. Indeed, the Shanghai market tumbled more than five per cent on July 5, before recovering on Friday. But $52 billion, whatever the environment, is serious money - without question a milestone in China's extraordinary economic transformation. Consider that the most money ever raised for IPOS in the United States in a single year was $63.1 billion. That was in 1999 - at the peak of the technology bubble...
Whether it will be sufficient - or happen quickly enough - to staunch the loss of high-paying jobs is a serious question. "As painful as all of this has been, you've had changes, really positive, powerful changes, that never in a million years would have happened without this disaster," Ricchiuti says. And despite lingering problems, there are many residents who are willing to tough it out, and hope businesses - and city officials - will follow their example...
...That's not exactly what America, especially coastal America, wants to hear as it heads into the serious phase of the hurricane season. But the storm surrounding the forecasters and Proenza, who this year replaced the avuncular Max Mayfield as the Hurricane Center's chief, doesn't look likely to lose strength any time soon. At the heart of the dispute is an aging weather satellite, known as QuickScat, named for the scatterometer that measures wind speed and direction. Proenza has argued for months that QuickScat, which was launched in 1999 and is well past its lifespan, needs...
...Others are more serious. The conventional wisdom is that public pre-university education is in disarray. On the day we visited a public elementary school, four out of 11 teachers were missing. The government takes the publicly-financed healthcare system very seriously; posters about child vaccinations and medical attention blanket buses. Over the past 15 years, the government has conducted a very aggressive and effective anti-AIDS campaign that has included universal free treatment and television advertisements featuring parents giving condoms to progeny of various sexual persuasions. However, the system has been criticized: The Minister of Health faced audience participation...