But Mr Legrain has a gift for combining big numbers that offer a sense of the scale of the global build-up in things like household debt while zeroing in on what all this means for people like Thorvaldur Thorvaldsson, a proudly left-wing Icelandic carpenter and unlikely sometime property speculator.

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EmployInsight is a new company which collects candidate data and offers in-line assessments online, attempting to build up a global skills database.

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If governments continue to allow anything like "business-as-usual" levels of global warming emissions, the build-up in the atmosphere is predicted to cause a further warming of 1 to 3.5 C (1.8 to 6.3 F) over the next century, according to WWF.

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For the USTA, the deal represents an effort to build the global cachet of the U.S. Open and the smaller tournaments that make up the U.S. Open Series, said Lew Sherr, who is the organization's chief revenue officer.

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