Word: laing
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...La Sagra, Spain Spaniards refer to the crash of their once booming real estate and construction industries as a "crisis of bricks." In La Sagra, they take that phrase literally. Located about 40 miles (65 km) south of Madrid, the clay-rich county produces roughly 30% of Spain's bricks, and boasts the greatest concentration of brick works in Europe. But right now, La Sagra's factories aren't making much of anything. "The warehouses are full," says Carlos Duque, general secretary for the Castilla-La Mancha branch of MCA-UGT, the construction workers' trade union. "They just...
Residents of the county don't have to look far for the reason why. The outskirts of towns like Alameda de la Sagra are dotted with partially built developments where construction has been halted for months. The bursting of Spain's real estate bubble sent several major developers into bankruptcy, and halted new home construction across the country. The number of houses built in 2008 is expected to fall by 70% from 2007. That's also fueling unemployment, which jumped by almost a third in September to reach 11.3%, Spain's highest rate since...
...La Sagra, they first felt the pinch months ago. "Construction started to really slow in February or March, with the subprime crisis in the U.S.," says Duque, "and that's when the brick warehouses started to fill up." Many brick works in the area closed over summer, but things have hardly improved since then. Duque says most of the brick companies in La Sagra have suspended workers temporarily in a program that allows them to receive unemployment benefits for three months and then return to a guaranteed job. With the financial meltdown adding to Spain's troubles and the country...
...fury is more bizarre than infectious. At one point Morello sings, “I pray that God himself will come and drown the President if the levees break again,” yet he spends much of the song filling space with pointless “la, la, las,” which leads to a rather confused message. Given the complete lack of melody offered by either Morello’s guitar or voice, the song drifts by without being anywhere near as passionate as it wants...
...bands of the 90s, and Morello practically invented the genre of “Nu-metal,” but whatever you think of that movement you cannot say that it was subtle. Simplistic left-wing posturing works much better when coupled with loud, powerhouse riffs, and Zack de la Rocha’s rapping than it does here with Morello’s flat voice and only intermittently engaging instrumentation. The volume may have been turned down, but on “The Fabled City” the failure of the Nightwatchman project rings through loud and clear...