New Year's Worries

With its natural disasters, disease outbreaks, war and terrorism, 2005 was a frightening yearand 2006 holds many of the same concerns, according to a TIME/CNN poll. Residents of four countries and one territory in the Asia-Pacific region said avian flu topped a list of issues expected to affect the world in the coming year, followed closely by fears of economic slowdown and terrorism. But the results varied widely from place to place: in Hong Kong, where the H5N1 virus first appeared in 1997 and where SARS killed 300 in 2003, more than half of those surveyed called avian flu the...