Word: spent
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...four families of Zhuangtouying have spent 13 years dealing with the modern-day descendants of Kangxi and his mandarins. Like millions of Chinese for whom the legal system has provided little satisfaction, they have sought redress through petitions in Beijing, exercising an ancient right to bypass the courts and appeal directly to the central government. Official statistics are unreliable, but legal scholars say that out of the nearly 12 million petitions filed in 2006, only a few thousand will succeed. Out of those, petitioners able to translate Beijing's decrees into corrective action by local officials likely number...
...water in England, where, he says, his brother works in a Birmingham coffee shop and has vowed to find him a job. That his entry and his job will almost certainly be illegal doesn't matter much to him. Lean and athletic, the 23-year-old says he has spent six weeks looking for a truck with a shipping container he can pry open and hide in during the ferry crossing to Dover. Though police dogs sniff vehicles and drivers seem vigilant in locking the containers, he says he'll keep trying until he succeeds...
...mind with Strawberry Hill, his 18th century faux-medieval villa on the outskirts of London that defied the Neoclassical consensus of his time and triggered the Gothic Revival. It was what Le Corbusier set out to do with the Villa Savoie, the landmark Modernist house. Libeskind, 61, who spent much of his early career as an architectural theoretician and teacher, routinely operates at the same level of ambition. With his most important projects - and Toronto is one of them - he makes what you might call polemical buildings. They're manifestos in metal and glass, intended to move the argument forward...
Last year ExxonMobil spent $19.9 billion looking for oil and improving its refinery, pipeline and pumping capacity. The company predicts that its capital and exploration spending will average more than $20 billion a year for the next five years. That's not spare change, but adjusted for inflation, it's only about 60% of what Exxon and Mobil together spent in 1981. Tellingly, it's also a lot less than what ExxonMobil handed over to its shareholders last year--$29.6 billion in stock buybacks and $7.6 billion in dividends...
...Baker Hughes keeps a monthly tally of how many rigs are active around the world, and the rig count peaked at 6,227 in December 1981. In April of this year it was just 2,836. But ExxonMobil is the most cautious of the lot. Slightly smaller rival Shell spent 25% more on capital and exploration in 2006, and the other oil majors spent more than ExxonMobil relative to their size. The Dallas-based industry leader still reports that its oil and gas reserves are growing. But recent gains have been modest, and most have been in natural...