new decade, same as the old

1-3--10--$35.billion. The amount in dollars that Chinese officials misused or embezzled in the first 11 months of 2009, according to a national audit. NYT WK 4
--As early as 9000 years ago, long before the wheels was invented, inhabitants of a Neolithic village in China were brewing a type of mead .. . The finding by Dr. McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Penn Museum, fits in with his thesis that the development of agriculture was the result of an irrepressible impulse toward drinking and intoxication. Ibid.
--At the CIA, in the 1980s, Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defesne, missed the signs of change in the Soviet Union. Ibid.