Panama City Tries to Exorcise its Red Devils

Barreling down Balboa Avenue, belching diesel fumes as they bully fancy European sports cars out of the way, the second-hand American school buses that pass for Panama City’s public transportation system seem like dinosaurs that took a wrong exit off the time-space continuum. Known as “red devils,” these graffiti-covered relics offer one of the few relics of Panama City’s origins.

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The McConaughey Mystery: King of Hunks

The obligatory Matthew McConaughey scene — as crucial to his fans as a Miley Cyrus song or a Seth Rogen penis joke is to theirs — is the ritual removing of his shirt, to reveal a torso that could have been sculpted, or certainly caressed, by Michelangelo. The gesture is not so much an act of narcissism as a votive offering to his core constituency.

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How to get 100 miles per gallon

We first met Gil Portalatin — a twenty-five year veteran at Ford — when testing the 2010 Fusion Hybrid in Los Angeles. In a fuel-economy competition against the media, Gil (an engineer by trade) effortlessly triumphed by racking up economy numbers that significantly bested the journalists and EPA estimates. On some runs, Gil’s Fusion returned nearly 47 mpg

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Parker, Broderick having twins

Sarah Jessica Parker is expecting twins this summer, but she’s not pregnant. The “Sex and the City” star and her husband of 12 years — actor Matthew Broderick — “are happily anticipating the birth of their twin daughters later this summer with the generous help of a surrogate,” according to a statement issued by their publicists. “The entire family is overjoyed,” the statement said

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Pandemic equals economic pain

While the swine flu raises public-health alarms globally, the prognosis for the world economy is not good if the outbreaks mutate into a pandemic. If there’s a pandemic on the level of the 1918 “Spanish” flu, a 2008 World Bank analysis says, it would cost the world economy $3.1 trillion and drop the world’s gross domestic product by 4.8 percent in the first year of infection. A pandemic like the less severe 1957 “Asian” flu would reduce global GDP by 2 percent, The World Bank concluded, while a pandemic like the most recent 1968 “Hong Kong” flu would cut world economic output by just under 1 percent

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The Hong Kong Flu Scare of ’08

Entering the emergency ward at Tuen Mun Hospital in Hong Kong these days feels a little like getting clearance into a correctional facility. A woman cloaked in head-to-toe blue protective gear stands watch at the sliding glass doors, checking visitors’ foreheads to ensure that no one running too high a fever gets through.

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