Word: stopgaps
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...Such aid is a stopgap solution to problems that have been brewing for years, but have only recently gone critical due to several complex factors: soaring oil prices; massive amounts of farmland diverted into producing biofuels; and crop failures from freak weather, including droughts in Australia and Europe and last month's cyclone in Burma (Myanmar). At the same time, millions of people in China and India can now afford to buy more food and eat more grain-fed meat, causing world food demand to soar...
...Emergency measures being taken by local authorities range from turning off Barcelona's beach showers to building a desalination plant that will be completed in 2009. Shipping in water is a stopgap measure to fend off the pressure on the city's supplies of this summer's thirst. The Catalan water agency has contracted 10 vessels for the next six months to ferry water from the French port of Marseilles and from the Spanish regions of Tarragona and Andalusia. The boats are expected to deliver some 92 million cubic feet of water each month, at a total cost...
...world food prices soar, leaving millions of the world's poor unable to afford staples they lived on just one year ago, the world's stopgap measure against extreme hunger also finds itself short of food. The WFP, the U.N.'s food-aid agency, headquartered in Rome, had budgeted $2.9 billion this year to buy food and distribute it to more than 70 million people worldwide. By late March, however, high food and fuel prices meant that those same planned operations were expected to cost an extra $500 million. Just one month later, says WFP executive director Josette Sheeran...
...Cubans keep those cars running because they have to. When the revolution of 1959 deposed Fulgencio Batista, the U.S.-backed authoritarian dictator, and installed a socialist government with land reform ambitions, the American reaction was swift and uncompromising. The Cuban embargo, at first a stopgap punitive measure, sank into the status quo over the course of decades, banning American trade, then tourism, then remittances, and finally any business exchange with foreign firms that violate Cuban alienation. In a triumph of branding, this last restriction was named the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, on the presumption that the best...
...lapse, the Democrats are weakening America's defenses against terrorism. "The terrorist threats to our nation are very real and grave, and inaction by the House in the face of these risks is unacceptable," says White House spokesperson Dana Perino. Democrats counter that many of the authorizations in the stopgap law will remain in effect for another year after it expires. "They've manufactured a crisis where none exists," says Jim Manely, spokesman for Senate majority leader Harry Reid. More than anything, though, the battle is a test of whether the country has moved past the "whatever-it-takes" politics...