Word: urbanization
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...female fox, it turns out, is highly toxic to grass; it can wipe out whole patches of a lawn in seconds and leave a tennis court in ruins. That one of the world's largest sporting events could be thrown into disarray by the startled evacuation of an urban fox is a telling reminder that each singles match at Wimbledon involves three living organisms: two players and the lawn beneath their feet. And for all the grunts and struggles of the players, the lawn has a huge effect on how tennis is played at the Championships...
Pakistan, which once supported the Taliban government in Afghanistan, is now suffering an insurgency of its own. Militants aligned with al-Qaeda have not only attacked security forces in the ungoverned tribal areas; they have also sent suicide bombers to major urban areas such as Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. The Pakistani army has been unable to contain the militants, and has already lost around 1,000 soldiers trying. In an attempt to gain stability, the military embarked last December on peace negotiations with militant groups. The newly elected government in Islamabad is backing the talks, and militants have agreed...
...discriminates, perhaps most tellingly, by geography, with 16.5% of rural kids qualifying as obese, compared with 14.4% of urban kids, according to the 2003 National Survey of Children's Health. The poorest states of the South and Appalachia--Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi and Kentucky--have the heaviest children. Adult obesity levels triple when you cross north of 96th Street in Manhattan, leaving the mostly white and well-off Upper East Side for the predominantly minority, poorer neighborhood of Spanish Harlem. Even in trim Colorado, there are obesity hot zones...
Another, often overlooked, factor is the simple matter of safety. Urban children should get at least one break in trying to stay healthy, since the greater density of city life makes it easier to walk to school, the park or just about anyplace else. But that advantage often evaporates in poorer neighborhoods, where recreational areas can be few and walking anywhere is perceived to be dangerous. Xuemei Zhu, a doctoral student at Texas A&M University, surveyed the neighborhoods of Austin and found that even in dense communities, parents often refused to allow kids to walk to school, fearing they...
...Manhattan. At any given moment, however, only about 8,000 of them are in operation in the heavily traveled midtown area. Keep those cars moving, and traffic flows smoothly all over the island. Jam them up, and gridlock can spread like ice freezing. "In fact," says urban-planning consultant Sam Schwartz, a former New York traffic commissioner who helped the city prepare for the 1980 transit strike, "in the case of true gridlock, the streets are actually 60% empty. All of the crowding is at the intersections, with nothing getting to midblock...