Word: districts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...District of Columbia has never had its own Senator or Representative, despite a population (nearly 600,000) larger than Wyoming's. That curious disenfranchisement may soon change, however, as a bill advances through Congress that would finally give D.C. a House member. On Feb. 24, the Senate voted to allow debate on the plan, which would expand the House to 437 members, its first enlargement in nearly 100 years. The bill would also grant Utah another vote until the next reapportionment in 2012, maintaining the body's partisan balance as D.C.'s addition would almost certainly be a Democrat...
Always an odd federal orphan, the District of Columbia has struggled to wean itself from congressional control since it was first cobbled together in 1790. Residents could vote for House members in neighboring Virginia and Maryland until 1801, but city leaders were originally appointed by the President. The city enjoyed some self-rule for much of the 19th century, but most of it was stripped away in 1874. Voters couldn't participate in presidential elections at all until the 23rd Amendment was ratified in 1963. After persistent lobbying by residents - their neighbors, after all - lawmakers passed the Home Rule...
Island Lessons A tour of Samso feels a bit like a greatest hits collection of Denmark's successful energy policies. The island features district heating plants fired by waste biomass such as straw. The plants provide heat to homes in lieu of more polluting oil-burning furnaces. When the sun is shining - which, admittedly, is not often - solar thermal panels provide hot water. Wind power is everywhere - on land, where towering turbines shade cows on a dairy farm, and offshore, where 10 turbines greet the incoming ferries like a row of sentinels. Many of the turbines are owned collectively...
Sirens breaking the silence of the night, cars engulfed by meter-high flames. This is not a scene from the banlieues of Paris, but from the trendy Eastern Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, where in recent weeks an ongoing battle against gentrification has intensified. In the past two months alone, 29 cars - mostly luxury brands like Mercedes, BMW and Porsche - have been set ablaze in Berlin (police believe left-wing extremists are to blame). In a letter published online in January, a leftist radical group called BMW (Bewegung für militanten Widerstand, or Movement for Militant Resistance) admitted...
...days after the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood, at least a thousand people lined up at movie theaters in Tokyo's Marunouchi district to see the film for which director Yojiro Takita brought home an Oscar. Departures (Okuribito) is the comical and dramatic story of an unemployed cellist who finds work cleaning and preparing the deceased for burial. The film has already grossed more than $34 million in Japan since its September 2008 release. (The film is scheduled for limited released in the U.S. in May.) Sales of Aoki's novel, on which the film is based, have spiked, along...