Word: scratchings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Illinois's southern tip is caught between catastrophes, literally. A dispute with the Federal Government has resulted in its loss of flood insurance - unless the impoverished town takes expensive measures, like hoisting homes and the few remaining businesses on stilts a dozen feet into the air. But if they scratch together the money to do so, it will be impossible to afford earthquake insurance, which is already prohibitively expensive...
...venture too far out of the box, voters will scratch their heads sooner or later - and eventually you might too. George H.W. Bush seems to have entered his Veep wish list into one of those dating computers back in 1988. That year he stunned nearly all his advisers when he tapped someone whose Midwestern roots were an antidote to his privileged Kennebunkport background, who was young to his old, who could balance his moderation with a dose of conservatism, and came up with Dan Quayle. The ticket beat the Democrats that fall, but by 1992 even Bush was trying...
Burma's New City Your recent article on the building of a new capital city in Burma [June 2] intrigued me. Amazingly, Naypyidaw, a new city of one million, was built from scratch in just three years. Now that Cyclone Nargis has made many tens of thousands of people homeless, I will watch and hope that the Burmese government puts as much effort into creating new cities for these people as they did in creating a city for themselves. Jeremy Stern, LONDON...
...projects off the ground quickly. Obstacles abound. After decades of neglect, transportation networks for getting crops to market consist mainly of rutted dirt roads; irrigation systems are in a shambles; and there's little access to credit for poor farmers. Aid agencies are starting some programs virtually from scratch. "There are very few plans to take off the shelf," says Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington...
There aren't any," says the hotelier with an embarrassed laugh when I ask about the best tourist attractions in Burma's new capital. That's no surprise, really. Naypyidaw--the name translates as "Abode of Kings"--was built from scratch just three years ago on orders from the ruling junta. The vast swath of former scrubland didn't even exist when the latest Lonely Planet Burma travel guide was written, and there's not much tourist charm in a dusty bunker town whose sole purpose is the wish fulfillment of paranoid generals...