1. ln his Uses of Enchantment(1976), it was psychologist Bruno Bettelheim’s assertion that the apparently cruel and arbitrary nature of many fairy tales actually are an instructive reflection of a child’s natural and necessary “killing off” of successive phases in his or her own development.

2. After weeks of uncertainty about the course the country would pursue to stabilize its troubled economy, officials reached a revised agreement with the lnternational Monetary Fund, pledging the enforcement of substantially greater budget discipline as that which was originally promised and to keep inflation below ten percent.

3. A new satellite sweeping over the poles at altitudes of up to 32,000 miles is called POLAR, giving scientists their best look yet at the magnetosphere, the region of space under the invisible influence of Earth’s magnetic field. 

4. The treasury market dropped in response to a decrease in the value of the dollar and to continued concern that the economy might be growing as fast as to accelerate inflation and drive interest rates higher.

5. Like Rousseau, Tolstoi rebelled against the unnatural complexity of human relations in modern society.

6. Japanese researchers are producing a series of robots that can identify human facial expressions, to which they will then respond; their goal is primarily creating a robot that will empathize with us.

7. Despite a growing population, in 1998 the United States used 38 billion fewer gallons of water a day when comparing it to the period of all-time highest consumption almost 20 years earlier.

8. Analysts believe that whereas bad decisions by elected leaders can certainly hurt the economy, no administration can really be said to control or manage all of the complex and interrelated forces that determine the nation’s economic strength.

9. Except for a concert performance that the composer himself staged in 1911, Scott Joplin’s ragtime opera Treemonisha was not produced until 1972, sixty-one years after its completion.

10. Nearly unrivaled in their biological diversity, coral reefs provide a host of benefits that includes the supply of protein for people, protecting shorelines, and they contain biochemical sources for new life-saving medicines.