Word: vastness
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...vermin gets another workout in this weekend's Daybreakers, an imaginative but wanly executed effort from the German-born twins, Michael and Peter Spierig. They picture a near future in which a plague has turned 90% of the world into vampires. The upside: immortality. Then again, with the vast majority of the population now bloodsuckers, there's a significant shortage of bloodsuckees: the few remaining humans, most of whom are imprisoned and "farmed" in a vast, multi-tiered, Matrix-like abattoir where their blood is systematically drained. Still, it's not enough. As I learn from a fellow reviewer...
...Dubai in Peril The crisis in Dubai is the crisis of unsustainable folly [Dec. 14]. It's amazing how eager our banks have been to pour money into a city-state sucking in vast amounts of energy and water to build and maintain a monstrous playground for the very rich. Heaven knows what its carbon footprint is. At its heart there is a sickness, with tales of dreadful working conditions for migrant laborers, who form a kind of permanent underclass. But what else can be expected of a place where the rich can party in their castles of sand while...
...Bigger Medicaid Tab Of the 31 million uninsured people who would gain coverage under a revamped health system, about half would do so through a vast expansion of Medicaid - the state-and-federal health care program for the poor. The Senate bill would make eligible anyone earning up to 133% of the federal poverty level (for a family of four, an income of about $29,300 a year); the House bill would lift that threshold to 150% of poverty (or about $33,000 for a family of four...
...attacks, against a CIA outpost in Afghanistan, succeeded; the other, on an airplane landing in Detroit, failed. The Undiebomber was an amateur who was thwarted, rather neatly, by his fellow passengers on the plane. The Afghanistan operation was quite the opposite - highly sophisticated and devastating, with vast implications for both the war in Afghanistan and future clandestine CIA operations. And yet the Undiebomber has provoked an avalanche of attention in our twittery media - and from Republicans like Dick Cheney who yearn for the return of "enhanced" interrogation techniques. The Afghanistan attack hasn't caused nearly the public fuss, but make...
...Russians would like to limit the number of delivery vehicles the two sides keep in their arsenals. The U.S. and Russia both have thousands of warheads in storage, which the START treaty (and likely its successor) will not touch. The Russians fear that if the U.S is allowed a vast force of half-empty missiles and bombers, it could in times of conflict quickly arm these delivery vehicles with stockpiled weapons - and thus have the capacity for an overwhelming "first strike" that could take out the more heavily concentrated Russian nuclear forces. That concern could breed distrust, and prove dangerous...