Word: hardes
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...Century A.D. Nicholas becomes a saint. The Catholic Church had not yet regulated its canonization procedure so it's hard to tell exactly when he is sainted. Nicholas is a very popular saint, especially in Europe. He becomes the patron of more objects and places than any other saint (except maybe Mary), although his primary role is as a guardian of children...
...keep it afloat when the rest of the world was succumbing to the impact of the growing global financial crisis. But that hope has now been crushed under an increasing tide of grimmer and grimmer statistics that seem to portray an economy in free fall. China will have its hard landing in 2009, and even the most optimistic economists now concede that GDP growth will be far below the 8% annual pace that Chinese economists and officials generally regard as the minimum necessary for the preservation of social order, possibly hitting 5% or under...
...particularly worried about unemployed workers and university graduates. Even the head of the country's Supreme Court warned judges to take social stability into mind when passing rulings. Overseas, too, worry swelled about just how deeply China's fragile social compact might be shaken by the experience of economic hard times for the first time in 30 years. The Obama administration should have a contingency plan for "what we would do if there's a major collapse of the political order," Roderick McFarquar of Harvard, one of the world's most respected China scholars, recently told a reporter. (See photos...
Anecdotal evidence of a bleak Christmas shopping season are starting to be confirmed by hard numbers. On Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported that consumer spending in November declined 0.6% from an already weak October. Disposable personal income, a gauge of how much money consumers have after the bills are paid, also declined in November, albeit a slight 0.1%. What's more, a hoped-for uptick in sales on the final weekend before Christmas does not appear to be materializing. Along with the sputtering economy, heavy winter weather across much of the nation played a big role in keeping people home...
Certainly, though, the Apollo 8 crew had earned the right to celebrate. It was Christmastime 1968 - the end of a hard year. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered; in June, Bobby Kennedy followed; in August, the Democratic Convention in Chicago dissolved into bloody rioting; and in each month of that exceedingly bloody year, 1,200 Americans had died in Vietnam. So people had bigger things on their minds in October when Apollo 7 - the first of the three-man Apollo ships - had orbited the Earth. And people might have been equally indifferent in December when Apollo 8 went...