Word: sparked
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...industry falling 4% in October, the first time it has declined in a decade. So is China - the "fragile superpower," as historian Susan Shirk memorably termed it - about to experience the one thing its leaders have feared for years: a so-called hard landing of its economy that could spark widespread social unrest...
...hard to start a fight in a place like that. As the Sudanese government did, you just find a divide - racial, political, cultural, religious - and promise one side as much land as they can steal. But the immediate spark shouldn't be allowed to detract from the war's underlying cause. Says Michael Klare, director of the Peace and World Security Program at Hampshire College in Massachusetts: "In Darfur, global warming exacerbates divisions along ethnic lines and produces ethnic wars that are, at root, resource conflicts...
Many of Africa's conflicts can be explained as tinderboxes that had long been waiting for a spark. In northern Kenya, Turkana tribes and armed gangs murder and rob each other in a cycle of violence fuelled by eight years of drought. In Rwanda, there is an increasing consensus that Africa's other recent genocide is at least partly understood as a contest between too many people on too little cultivable land. The U.N. Development Program predicted as long ago as November 1999 that one in two Africans would face water shortages by 2025, and said it expected violent flashpoints...
...FINDING THE RIGHT combination of spark, fuse and black powder will fall to Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, two friends Obama named to lead his economic team. Geithner, 47, will leave his job as chief of the New York Federal Reserve to become Treasury Secretary. His mentor Summers, 54, who was Treasury boss for a year and a half under Bill Clinton, will move into the West Wing in January to take over the National Economic Council (NEC), the clearinghouse for all economic policy inside the Administration...
...China - the "fragile superpower" as one historian memorably called it - about to experience the one thing its leaders and many analysts and academics outside the country have feared for years: a violent contraction in its economy that some fear could spark widespread social unrest among its billion inhabitants? (See pictures of the global financial crisis...