Word: spikes
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...letter Wednesday to the Office of Management and Budget, Rep. Henry Waxman, the senior Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, claims that Bush Administration cabinet officers have "routinely flaunted" the rules governing the use of private planes. Traveling on private planes and helicopters, he complains, always seems to spike around election time. During the 2004 campaign, travel on private aircraft to cities in battleground states "was over four times higher than in non-election years," says Waxman. In October 2004, for example, then Education Secretary Rodney Paige spent $50,290 on private jet travel in three key states - Pennsylvania...
...festival of Eid, a day of feasting, shopping for new clothes and giving gifts - and many residents of Baghdad would normally have made a beeline for Karrada's shops, where they can buy everything from large-screen TVs and air conditioners to garments and sweets. In anticipation of a spike in demand, many shopkeepers had doubled their inventory. But because the neighborhood has been shut off by U.S. and Iraqi forces, shoppers are taking their business elsewhere, much to the chagrin of Karrada's business community. "In a good year, as much as 20% of my annual income would have...
...visited earlier this year and promised a clean-up after a campaign by local activists drew national media attention to the cocktail of pollutants including chromium, benzene and volatilized phenol that had poisoned wells and, in at least one village, caused rice to stop growing and cancer rates to spike. But just last month, a tributary of the Tangbai was so polluted that when a TIME reporter drove by, hundreds of people stood along the banks of a stream with a powerful chemical stench, pulling out dead and dying fish. According to the fishermen, the same thing happened every month...
...speculation by parents. In 1970, its incidence was thought to be just 1 in 2,500; today about 1 in 170 kids born in the U.S. fall somewhere on the autism spectrum (which includes Asperger's Syndrome), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some of the spike can be reasonably attributed to a new, broader definition of the disorder, better detection, mandatory reporting by schools and greater awareness of autism among doctors, parents and educators. Still, there's a nagging sense among many experts that some mysterious X-factor or factors in the environment tip genetically susceptible...
...That comparison obviously looks plain silly, now, so instead we are left with Vietnam - albeit different interpretations of Vietnam. As Professor Juan Cole points out, Bush is probably relying on a hawkish view that while the Tet Offensive was a major military defeat for the Viet Cong, the spike of violence it brought may have struck a crippling political blow at the American public's will to fight the war. As Cole notes, the irony is that the upside of Tet may not be the first thing that comes to mind for Americans when their President compares Iraq to Vietnam...