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...Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) forecasts that by 2011 the ratio of government debt to gross domestic product - the main measure of a state's financial health - will reach 100% in the U.S., up from 62% in 2007. That's almost as large as Greece's burden today. Ireland's debt burden is expected to triple over that same period to 93%, while the U.K.'s could double to 94%. Japan is the worst of the bunch, with its ratio likely to top 200%. Just as risky private-sector indebtedness caused the Great Recession, government debt...
...financially aid wayward members. That's how a crisis in Greece, which represents a mere 2.8% of the zone's GDP, can have such an outsized impact. The ultimate fear is that Greece will default, dragging down the euro with it. "A lot of the euro's problems today are rooted in those members having failed to integrate enough," says Bob Hancké, a professor of European political economy at the London School of Economics. "I'm one of those people who can imagine there being no euro - or at least not one similar to what we know today - within...
...four subspecies of tiger - Siberian, Indochinese, Bengal and South China - have been all but killed off within China's borders. In 1993, Beijing banned the nation's domestic trade in tigers and their parts and, today, China is one of 175 parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which outlawed tiger trafficking globally. But Chinese demand still drives a lucrative pan-Asian trade in poached tigers, which other countries blame for the accelerating decline in their own wild populations. In India, 88 tigers were killed in 2009 - double the previous year...
...Today, penalties for harming tigers in China are harsh - a villager in Yunnan province was recently jailed for 12 years for killing and eating what might well have been the country's last wild Indochinese tiger. But the laws are patchily enforced. In December the SFA released a directive promising better protection of wild tigers and a sterner crackdown on the illegal trade. Many conservationists remain unconvinced. "We've heard these words before from China," says Mike Baltzer, leader of the World Bank - backed Global Tiger Initiative at the conservation group WWF. "We're waiting to see if they really...
...pains to dilute and spread out the powers of the central government. They did not want an overweening concentration of power at the center of our national life. At the same time, they arrived at those checks and balances through a spirit of compromise--something that's notably absent today in Washington. On the final day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin noted that every member should "doubt a little of his own infallibility...