Some 150 politicians, civil servants, tribal chiefs, police officers, Sunni clerics and members of Awakening Councils have been assassinated throughout Iraq since the election — bloodshed apparently aimed at heightening turmoil in the power vacuum created by more than three months without a national government.
The danger is that the claims on the Lehman default are so large — they are estimated at $400 billion to $600 billion — that settling them could leave some companies with large, perhaps even crippling, losses and heighten the turmoil in the financial markets.
The Treasury said concerns about the value of money market funds falling below the standard net asset value of $1 a share — or "breaking the buck" — had heightened the financial turmoil and caused severe liquidity strains in world markets.
The turmoil has heightened worries about how states and towns, particularly poorer ones, will pay their bills as a weakening housing market and potential recession squeeze tax revenues.
The announcement by the chief judge, Midhat al-Mahmoud, represented a crucial step forward after nearly three months of setbacks and turmoil that heightened the sense of crisis here and stoked popular anger.
Despite the political turmoil -- heightened by an undercurrent of fear about Russia's meddling in the country's affairs -- the impeachment process did little to distract the country from its principal economic and foreign policy goal of joining Europe's elite club of nations.
The image of Republican turmoil was heightened Wednesday when Representative Christopher Lee, a second-term Republican from upstate New York, resigned after a disclosure by a Web site, Gawker.com, that he had sent embarrassing photographs and misrepresented himself to a woman he contacted through Craigslist.
The initial images offer slightly different angles, ones that seem charged with unreleased energy, a sense of stress and imbalance that reflects the turmoil of the moment — a turmoil that's heightened by comparison to the relatively rectilinear, uninflected 2010 remakes.
Recent protests against austerity plans in Greece and Spain have also heightened investors' concerns as the turmoil could impede political maneuvering.
The prospect of Greece plunging into political turmoil will be heightened by speculation that Tsipras may be forced to call early elections.
