Ten Words from Today's NY Times - October 24, 2012

But in many ways they have obscured what is arguably the nation’s biggest challenge: breaking out of a decade of income stagnation that has afflicted the middle class and the poor and exacerbated inequality.

Matching the growth rates of the postwar period — when the country was poorer, when harsh discrimination against women and minorities was receding and when the rest of the world was weaker — is probably impossible.

And if inequality continues to soar, the government could choose to use the tax code to ameliorate it — a solution that Democrats favor and Republicans say will hurt economic growth.

That morning, at 11:08, a person with privileged access to the Saudi state-owned oil company’s computers, unleashed a computer virus to initiate what is regarded as among the most destructive acts of computer sabotage on a company to date.

Iranian oil ministry officials have claimed that the Wiper software code forced them to cut Internet connections to their oil ministry, oil rigs and the Kharg Island oil terminal, a conduit for 80 percent of Iran’s oil exports.

The New York Times reported in June that the United States, together with Israel, was responsible for Stuxnet, the computer virus used to destroy centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010.

Last May, researchers discovered that Flame had been siphoning data from computers, mainly in Iran, for several years.

When the hedge fund manager John A. Paulson stood in front of a gently cascading Bethesda Fountain on Tuesday morning in the heart of Central Park and announced a $100 million gift to the Central Park Conservancy, it seemed to come out of nowhere, like an errant ball from one of the park’s playing fields.

But the conservancy’s leaders note that the park’s future success was never assured, citing past periods of decline, particularly the nadir of the 1970s.

He recalled the scruffy 1970s and early ’80s, when the park was in “serious disrepair — its infrastructure was crumbling, its landscape was in shambles and it was plagued with drugs and crime.”