In March 2020, as the planet began to enter lockdown, acclaimed cartoonist Simon Hanselmann decided that what the world needed most was free, easily accessible entertainment, so he set out to make the greatest webcomic ever created! The result is also certain to be one of the most acclaimed and eagerly anticipated graphic novels of 2021. As the Covid-19 pandemic continued to escalate far beyond any reasonable expectations, Crisis Zone escalated right alongside, in real time, with daily posts on Instagram. Crisis Zone's battle mission was to amuse the masses: no matter how horrible and bleak everything seemed, at least Werewolf Jones wasn’t in your house! Over the course of 2020, Crisis Zone has amassed unprecedented amounts of new fans to the Megg and Mogg universe and is presented here, unabridged and uncensored, with a slew of added pages and scenes deleted from the webcomic, as well as an extensive “Director’s Commentary” from Hanselmann himself.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An urgent wake-up call about the future of emerging viruses and a gripping account of the doctors and scientists fighting to protect us, told through the story of the deadly 2013–2014 Ebola epidemic “Crisis in the Red Zone reads like a thriller. That the story it tells is all true makes it all more terrifying.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction From the #1 bestselling author of The Hot Zone, now a National Geographic original miniseries . . . This time, Ebola started with a two-year-old child who likely had contact with a wild creature and whose entire family quickly fell ill and died. The ensuing global drama activated health professionals in North America, Europe, and Africa in a desperate race against time to contain the viral wildfire. By the end—as the virus mutated into its deadliest form, and spread farther and faster than ever before—30,000 people would be infected, and the dead would be spread across eight countries on three continents. In this taut and suspenseful medical drama, Richard Preston deeply chronicles the pandemic, in which we saw for the first time the specter of Ebola jumping continents, crossing the Atlantic, and infecting people in America. Rich in characters and conflict—physical, emotional, and ethical—Crisis in the Red Zone is an immersion in one of the great public health calamities of our time. Preston writes of doctors and nurses in the field putting their own lives on the line, of government bureaucrats and NGO administrators moving, often fitfully, to try to contain the outbreak, and of pharmaceutical companies racing to develop drugs to combat the virus. He also explores the charged ethical dilemma over who should and did receive the rare doses of an experimental treatment when they became available at the peak of the disaster. Crisis in the Red Zone makes clear that the outbreak of 2013–2014 is a harbinger of further, more severe outbreaks, and of emerging viruses heretofore unimagined—in any country, on any continent. In our ever more interconnected world, with roads and towns cut deep into the jungles of equatorial Africa, viruses both familiar and undiscovered are being unleashed into more densely populated areas than ever before. The more we discover about the virosphere, the more we realize its deadly potential. Crisis in the Red Zone is an exquisitely timely book, a stark warning of viral outbreaks to come.

This book presents revised version of Professor Berend's Ellen McArthur Lectures, delivered in Cambridge in 1984. His theme is the problem of the consequences of only partially successful modernisation in East-Central Europe above all in the inter-war years. The results and failures of this process of modernisation generated several kinds of revolution - national, right-wing, and bolshevik - offset by the social, political and cultural effects of the First World War. Professor Berend's lectures investigate the complexity of these phenomena, the interrelationships among various economic processes, ideological and political trends, and the artistic endeavours of the period.

In 2007, countries in the Euro periphery were enjoying stable growth, low deficits, and low spreads. Then the financial crisis erupted and pushed them into deep recessions, raising their deficits and debt levels. By 2010, they were facing severe debt problems. Spreads increased and, surprisingly, so did the share of the debt held by domestic creditors. Credit was reallocated from the private to the public sectors, reducing investment and deepening the recessions even further. To account for these facts, we propose a simple model of sovereign risk in which debt can be traded in secondary markets. The model has two key ingredients: creditor discrimination and crowding-out effects. Creditor discrimination arises because, in turbulent times, sovereign debt offers a higher expected return to domestic creditors than to foreign ones. This provides incentives for domestic purchases of debt. Crowding-out effects arise because private borrowing is limited by financial frictions. This implies that domestic debt purchases displace productive investment. The model shows that these purchases reduce growth and welfare, and may lead to self-fulfilling crises. It also shows how crowding-out effects can be transmitted to other countries in the Eurozone, and how they may be addressed by policies at the European level.

In a little over one decade, the spread of market-oriented policies has turned the once so-called lesser developed countries into emerging markets. Many forces have been responsible for the tremendous growth in emerging markets. Trends toward market-oriented policies that permit private ownership of economic activities, such as public utilities and telecommunications, are part of the explanation. Corporate restructuring, following the debt crisis of the early 1980's has permitted many emerging market companies to gain international competitiveness. And an essential condition, a basic sea-change in economic policy, has opened up many emerging markets to international investors. This growth in emerging markets has been accompanied by volatility in individual markets, and a sector-wide shock after the meltdown in the Mexican Bolsa and Mexican peso, resulting in heated debate over the nature of these markets. Emerging market capital flows continue to be the subject of intense discussion around the world among investors, academics, and policymakers. Emerging Market Capital Flows examines the issues of emerging market capital flows from several distinct perspectives, addressing a number of related questions about emerging markets.

A startling 85% of churches in the US are plateaued or declining, a trend that has been building for the past fifty years. In the face of shrinking attendance and lagging spiritual growth, pastors and church leaders are understandably discouraged and demoralized. But the first step to turning things around is hope. Church health expert Gary McIntosh offers this hope by showing church leaders the first things they need to do to make a new start for their church. God can and does restore churches to new life, even as he restores individuals. The street-smart ideas and step-by-step instructions found in this book are ones that pastors and church leaders can put to use immediately in their churches to bring about solid growth and renewed hope for the future.

Systemic financial crises have become a common feature of the global financial landscape. Resolution of such crises requires a complex mix of macroeconomic and financial sector policies, including the restructuring and resolution of problem banks. This volume outlines the theoretical insights that have been gained and the practical lessons learned.