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1. The Dow drops below 9,000 for the first time in five years. Investors¹ are gloomy about the economy and the health of corporations. Shares of General Motors tumbled almost 30 percent to their lowest level since 1950.

2. President Bush will meet with finance officials from other industrialized nations, hearing from these ministers how the financial crisis is affecting their economies and what they are doing about it. Bush is expected to stress the need for nations to work together to fix the crisis.

3. North Korea says it is reactivating the compound that produced its first atomic bomb and will ban UN inspectors² from the site. All of this brings the nation closer to relaunching its nuclear weapons program.

4. In a sign of the times, the National Debt Clock in New York has run out of digits³. So as a fix, the dollar sign is being switched to a figure--the number "1" is in $10 trillion, marking the current debt of the US government.

WORDS IN THE NEWS

1. reactivate: v.

If people reactivate a system or organization, they make it work again after a period in which it has not been working.

2. the National Debt Clock: n.

The National Debt Clock is a billboard-sized display installed at the Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan which is constantly updated to show the current United States public debt and each family's share. Invented and sponsored by New York real estate developer Seymour Durst, it was installed in 1989. After Seymour's death in 1995, his son Douglas Durst became president of the Durst Organization which owns and maintains the clock.