My father is at once quick witted, wickedly funny, and then poignancy turns on a dime and leaves you breathless.

The 67 year old Xue suffers from congenital scoliosis, and in recent years she has been troubled by asthma , so she panted and was breathless even walking on the slope.

But some dubious assertions have, through constant repetition in recent, often breathless, accounts about the two economies, become part of conventional wisdom. Much of what really goes on inside these two large countries is often left out.

The media, eager for breathless headlines, share the blame with politicians for this state of affairs. Following the release of the Stern Review, one British newspaper reportedly wrote Act now or the world we know will be lost forever.

OXFORD The forces that drove the growth of European and North American cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are now driving urbanization in Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia, and other emerging market countries. Because the growth of these cities has been accelerated and magnified by productive technologies, rapid internal migration, and high net reproduction rates, many have reached unprecedented sizes at breathless speed.