Word: summer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...North Korea is trying to send messages to three audiences at the same time. The first is its own people, who need to be reassured at a time when rumors continue to circulate about the health of their Dear Leader, who foreign intelligence agencies believe had a stroke last summer. Like his father before him, Kim Jong Il rules on the strength of "symbolic capability," says Song Dae-sung, president of the Sejong Institute, a South Korean think tank. "North Korea idolizes a single leader. Kim Jong Il's bad health and leaflets being sent by anti-North Korea NGOs...
...final days of 2008, residents of Australia's southeast might have been forgiven for thinking summer had finished early. On the island state of Tasmania in the far south, freezing gales blew, blanketing mountains with snow. In the state of Victoria, in the southeastern corner of the mainland, the number of sunny hours a day dropped from the normal 8.3 to a mere seven. "Where has our summer gone," moaned a newspaper report, while some readers commented that it made you wonder if global warming was real...
Australia's Minister for Climate Change Penny Wong told the media the heat wave was "consistent with climate change, and all of this is consistent with what scientists told us would happen." But some readers remained skeptical. "One swallow does not make a summer?a few stinking awful days doesn't mean the climate is changing either," one person emailed to the Canberra Times. It was not clear where in Australia he lived...
...Despite Western disillusionment with Karzai, there's no sign thus far that Washington believes Afghanistan's fledgling democracy might produce a more capable successor. But pressure on Karzai from Washington - and even the planned "surge" of three new U.S. combat brigades into Afghanistan starting this summer - may set the U.S. on a collision course with its client in Kabul. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned during congressional testimony this week that the U.S. would have to narrow its objectives, abandoning any ideas of turning Afghanistan into "a Central Asian Valhalla." The immediate priority of the Administration's new war plan...
...Clinton's last Treasury Secretary, Summers championed regulatory reforms that relaxed New Deal-era restrictions on banks - a shift that some economists have blamed for the current financial crisis and that Obama criticized during the campaign. None of these controversies gave the candidate pause last summer when he invited Summers into his inner circle for briefings on the deteriorating economy. As both a campaign and a White House adviser, Summers helped guide Obama's conviction that the economic crisis was an opportunity as well as a curse, a chance to accelerate many of his campaign pledges. In a column about...