Word: sprawls
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About five million people, or a quarter of the population of Mexico City's urban sprawl, woke up Thursday with dry taps. The drought was caused by the biggest stoppage in the city's main reservoir system in recent years to ration its depleting supplies. Government officials hope this and four other stoppages will keep water flowing until the summer rainy season fills the basins back up. But they warn that the Mexican capital needs to seriously overhaul its water system to stop an unfathomable disaster in the future. (See pictures of the world water crisis...
...leaders in their motorcades swept out of central London and into the bleaker reaches of the city's eastern sprawl at first light this morning. After sporadic violence from protestors yesterday and amid tight anti-terror precautions, police were out in force along the otherwise deserted route. The delegations were served breakfast before being lined up for the obligatory family snap and then sitting down for business. They have 2 hours and 40 minutes before lunch and one hour after lunch to finalize their plans. Because many of the chief participants need to depart London this evening for tomorrow...
...time real estate development resumes, we can move beyond the incoherent, anything-goes paradigm of the postwar era and produce more places to live along the lines of the towns and cities everyone instinctively loves, communities designed to become true communities. "The days where we're just building sprawl forever," Obama said in February in South Florida, "those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats - everybody recognizes that that's not a smart way to design communities...
...wasted. This is common sense, when you think about it. Earmarks got their name from the bygone practice of branding the ears of livestock to identify their owners, but no one would have thought a pig without an earmark was kosher. The vast majority of wasteful federal spending - sprawl roads and bridges to nowhere, corporate welfare for agribusinesses and Big Oil and King Coal, bloated health care costs, and so on - is done within the regular appropriations process. It's not as soundbite-ready as a $238,000 earmark for the Polynesian Voyaging Society, but it's a lot more...
...forms of scrutiny. But the Constitution does give Congress the power of the purse, and earmarks can sometimes be the only way for congressmen to force recalcitrant bureaucracies to take on worthy projects. For example, most federal transportation aid goes directly to state agencies with monomaniacal attachments to building sprawl roads; maybe that's why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has an earmark for a bike path in the latest budget...