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...year-old record for total seasonal precipitation. "No one ever has seen this much snow in Washington, D.C.," according to Mayor Adrian Fenty, who said on Wednesday that the city would ask the federal government to foot some of the cleanup costs. The city's Department of Transportation director of communications, Karyn Le Blanc, told TIME that plow crews were on their ninth 12-hour shift clearing snow, a stretch that dates back to the weekend's blizzard. "Mother nature has a very weird sense of humor," she quipped. More snow is expected next week...
...tide is now turning in Europe. Charles Grant, director of the London-based Centre for European Reform, published a paper last month arguing that Europeans need to agree on a single message in their dealings with China so that Beijing can't play a game of divide and conquer. At the same time, he said, the E.U. should "abandon the fiction of a 'strategic partnership,'" which cannot be meaningful with such divergent value systems, and focus on a limited number of issues on which China and the E.U. can find agreement...
Recovering the Tico mojo is Chinchilla's prime mandate - provided she proves to be her own woman and not, as her opponents insist, Arias' political proxy. "Costa Rica has certainly lost some of its dynamism," says Susan Kaufman Purcell, director of the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami. "But if Chinchilla turns out to be the leader she shows promise of being, she can get that back." As she declared victory last Sunday night, Feb. 7, in the capital, San José, with 47% of the vote vs. 25% for her main center-left rival, Otton Solis...
...access to education. Schools used to be one of Costa Rica's largest sources of pride and a big reason First World high-tech giants like Intel invested in the country. But "most Costa Ricans feel the quality of public education has dropped off considerably," says Jorge Mora, director of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in San José. One indicator: in the 1990s, the wealthiest 10% of Costa Rica's population earned 15 times what the poorest tenth made; in the 2000s that figure was almost 25 times...
...with a half-built Olympic Village, but at a great price: in early 2009, new Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson declared that taxpayers were "on the hook" for the $1 billion project. "What ended up happening was that the city became a bank for private-sector development," says Mark Cutler, director of Olympic Village Development for the Vancouver Organizing Committee, the body that is operating the complex during the Games. (See what becomes of Olympic stadiums...