Word: steep
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...group considered itself the haut monde of child pornography, zapping reams of the stuff to each other via their own private chat room. To join the highly secretive "Wonderland" club, each member had to cough up steep membership dues: 10,000 sexually explicit images of kids. Once inside, at the bottom of seven layers of electronic security, they had access to 750,000. There are pictures of a fair-haired toddler, still in diapers, being sexually abused; of young girls and boys, even babies as young as three months, being raped, genitally and anally; of children performing sex acts...
...Then a miracle happened. Italy's efforts to join the euro led to a steep drop in interest rates. By April 1998 the market average for new loans had fallen below 8.3%. Tomaso, a lawyer, noticed that this appeared to render his Banca di Roma loan illegal under a 1996 anti-usury act. The law prohibits creditors from charging more than one-and-a-half times current rates. Tomaso went to the bank and asked to renegotiate; he first was turned down, and then the bank offered a deal with a hefty refinancing fee. But the Longos kept pushing...
What's the billionaire beef? Basically this: revenue lost from repeal of the estate tax would mean additional tax on the middle class or a reduction in their benefits and services. Further, repeal would lead to a steep drop in charitable giving as the wealthy stop looking for ways to reduce their estates. So righteous are these superrich that, as reported by the New York Times, the only reason Warren Buffet didn't sign was because the petition doesn't go far enough in defending the estate tax, which he insists promotes success based on merit, not bloodline. Buffet likened...
...back several weeks - a continuance that may signal a deal on the horizon. That's good news for the troubled actor: If Downey is convicted of this most recent felony, he could face more than four years in prison, although it's unlikely that his penalty will be that steep...
...accounts, imagine how the managers of America's huge pension funds feel. The top 100 U.S. pension funds boasted a gargantuan $3.5 trillion in combined assets last September. Now, despite having fortified their reserves with huge stock-market gains in recent years, public and private pension funds are facing steep declines. Northrop Grumman, a giant in the aerospace and defense industry, called attention to this little-known fact in December. It warned that a drop in income from its pension investments could knock $50 million in pre-tax dollars off corporate profits this year. After final numbers for 2000 came...