Word: culprit
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From a broader perspective, this entire lamentable situation was not unforeseeable. California’s dysfunctional political system, which leads to constantly rising spending that is rarely accompanied by tax increases, is the primary culprit. Issues like the tuition hikes in the UC system are the symptoms of poor fiscal practices that must be corrected if the welfare of California residents is to be preserved. The inability to implement taxation that keeps pace with spending is crippling California. If Californians are sincere about avoiding problems like the tuition debacle in the UC system, they must address the root cause...
...while officials may insist that incidents like this month’s shooting at Ford Hood are “isolated,” in reality, they are the unfortunate consequence of the trauma suffered by the men and women in our armed forces. Major Nidal Hasan, the latest culprit, would have known this better than anyone, having devoted his life to treating soldiers afflicted with PTSD, an alarmingly prevalent condition in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That a mental-health specialist would commit such an atrocious act of malice reflects the severity of this mental...
...economic narcissism was certainly the culprit in the devastation wrought by financial markets, which have subjected us to an increasingly frequent series of crashes, frauds and recessions. To a great degree, this was brought about by a lethal combination of irresponsible deregulation and accommodating monetary policies instituted by the Federal Reserve. Bankers and financial engineers had an unsupervised free-market free-for-all just as the increased complexity of financial products - e.g., derivatives - screamed out for greater regulation or at least supervision. Enron, for instance, was a bastard child of a deregulated utilities industry and a mind-bending financial alchemy...
Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work. The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power...
...simple terms, body weight is a reflection of the balance between two variables: the calories a body takes in and the calories it burns off. As far as the average U.S. teen is concerned, the study suggests, the culprit behind weight gain is not a decrease in exercise but an increase in consumption. Of course, that doesn't mean teens are getting adequate exercise: Wang analyzed data from nearly 16,000 high school students between the ages of 15 and 18, who took part in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's longitudinal Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey, about...