Word: strained
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...insulation in most buildings, China is a highly inefficient user of energy: to produce a dollar of GDP it burns two and a half times the energy that the U.S. uses, and nine times what Japan consumes. Analysts now worry that the economy is finally beginning to show the strain. "We're particularly concerned that rising energy costs will amplify the existing squeeze on corporate profit margins in China," says Ben Simpfendorfer, an economist at JPMorgan Chase in Hong Kong. Indeed, Shanghai Petrochemical, a unit of the state-owned oil company Sinopec, warned last week that profits in the second...
...week. The lethal , H5N1 ,mavian flu virus, which has killed 57 of the 112 people it's infected in Asia since the end of 2003 and caused the death or destruction of 150 million poultry there, was found in flocks in Russia and Kazakhstan. Then Finnish authorities said another strain of the virus may have killed a seagull in a northern coastal town. The discoveries fanned fears that it could travel west and infect the European Union's estimated ?22-billion-a-year egg-and-poultry industry, or mutate into a strain that leaps the species barrier to humans. Agricultural...
...Gulf, called the war metaphor "inadequate" for drugs in 1996: "This isn't going to be won by anybody's army." Former State Department official David Long told the New York Times in 1998 that flu would be a better analogy for terrorism: "Every year there's a new strain. You manage it. You're not going...
...Grimm, it was Gilliam who nearly cracked up, but the strain doesn't show onscreen. The film is a colorful ragbag of fairy-tale tropes, with crones peddling apples, a girl in a red riding hood running into a wolf and a vain queen at her magic mirror. Gilliam, who loathes the "juvenile fantasy" of movie heroism, makes the brothers pleasant but oafish; Headey, in a gorgeous, starmaking turn, is the real hero as the fearless witch Angelika. The movie's sense of humor is high-low in the Python style. It alternates the drollery of Jonathan Pryce's French...
...deftly judged juggling between directing his government's response to the bombings and trying to make sure the G-8 meeting of world leaders he was chairing at Gleneagles, a bucolic resort in Scotland, came to the ambitious conclusion on relieving African poverty that he has been straining to achieve for a year. After the bombings, he plowed through several press conferences, as well as emergency meetings of a Cabinet committee and eleventh-hour bargaining sessions at Gleneagles from which he secured an agreement to double aid to Africa by 2010. He did it all without putting a foot wrong...