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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...
...communities on the city outskirts. The city has, however, sent out of fleets of water trucks, and Mayor Marcelo Ebrard - who built urban beaches and a winter ice rink for the poor - is personally handing out free bottled water. Aguirre says the long-term solution involves teaching people to ration their water much better. "We need to educate people from when they are children that water is valuable and needs to be used wisely," he says...
...says Arreguin. Furthermore, on Easter Saturdays, residents traditionally have huge water fights, in which everyone from grandparents to young children join in hurling bucket loads over each other. Piet Klop, an investigator at the Washington-based environmental think tank World Resources Institute, says that people will not learn to ration water unless it hits their pockets. "We need to understand that it is a more valuable commodity than oil and prices must reflect that better," Klop says. "Cheap subsidized water is not helping people. It is giving them a bad service." However, radically hiking the prices of any basic commodity...
...broken ancient taboos by suggesting France study American-style equal opportunity, quotas and the use of ethnic data within official statistics to get a more accurate picture of the nation's face. "There are two Frances," Arab-French businessman Yazid Sabeg told the daily Libération. "One wants to look things in the face - meaning the way demographics in this country have changed. The other is conservative France, which is prone to immobility in the name of largely artificial equality." (See pictures of France's Bastille Day celebrations...
...savvy, the Big Three have also outsourced much of the current fight over the California rules to the National Automobile Dealers Association, long-time critics of legislation. Dealers say they would wind up enforcing a "patchwork quilt" of state regulations, and that the California approach would force automakers to ration certain popular large models. Dolinger says the patchwork argument is nonsense because the rules imposed by the different states are exact copies of the California's regulations. "There is only one standard," he says. He adds that the regulations are also flexible enough to account for consumer preferences...