Word: year
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This just in: Somalia hasn't gotten any better. For the third year in a row, the African nation topped the annual Corruption Perceptions Index, produced by the global watchdog group Transparency International, because of concerns over rampant piracy off its coasts and the crumbling government. More troubling for the U.S. and its allies, Afghanistan, viewed as the second most corrupt nation, is up three spots from 2008, as its Taliban insurgency has worsened. Iraq, still bedeviled by reconstruction woes, placed fifth...
Plain old niacin--a B vitamin--may be better at unclogging arteries than an ingredient in Merck's multibillion-dollar cholesterol drugs Zetia and Vytorin, according to a recent study. It's the third trial in two years to question the pills' effectiveness. Patients are growing skittish: sales of both drugs fell to $4.56 billion in 2008, down 12% from the year before...
More than 14% of U.S. families--17 million households--struggled to put food on the table last year, according to a USDA report that found Americans' food insecurity at its highest level since the government started keeping statistics on hunger in 1995. Nearly 7 million households skipped meals or experienced disrupted eating patterns. Most food-insecure households saw adults go without food to shield children from hunger, although 500,000 families reported that their children were also affected...
...aides, for allegedly orchestrating war crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo from his perch in Europe. Prosecutors say that since 2001, Ignace Murwanashyaka has remotely commanded the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a paramilitary rebel group accused of killing hundreds of Congolese citizens this year. The organization is composed mainly of ethnic Hutu, some of whom are believed to be responsible for the massacre of more than 500,000 Rwandan Tutsi in 1994. The arrest of Murwanashyaka, who has lived in Germany since the 1980s, came just days before a U.N. report revealed direct links between...
...puritans now. over the past two years, Americans have largely stopped spending more money than we had and running up credit-card tabs we couldn't pay off. To a great extent, we've been hectored into behaving more like our parsimonious Pilgrim forebears, whose expression of gratitude we celebrate Nov. 26. But the day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, and it's in need of all the consumption it can get: conspicuous, ridiculous, tasteless or otherwise. It could take a Snuggie Christmas to keep the economy on the mend. Last holiday...