Instead, the Islanders welcomed the return of the NHL's best player by issuing a reminder to Crosby and the rest of Pittsburgh's star-studded roster: it takes more than bold-faced names to survive at this time of year.

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Russia, meanwhile, has offered a reminder that Kazakhstan, like the rest of Central Asia, used to be part of the Soviet empire.

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Lest you need a sobering reminder about the US culture of waste: if the rest of the world wasted the way Americans do, we would by now need three more planets and one extra atmosphere.

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At the least, they will provide the rest of us with a physical counterpoint to today's narcissism, a reminder to look out, not in.

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The persistence of such attitudes in the face of the changes wrought by migration is a reminder that the South is not, in fact, getting more like the rest of the country.

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Maybe Chung Mong-koo was just showing good old-fashioned restraint in the face of some frothiness from the rest of the industry (just who is going to buy all those cars?) but it was a reminder that Koreans, with their won currency appreciating again, are dependent on the health of export markets and not all is well around the globe.

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