Word: townes
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...their budget whining. Mayor Alvarez insisted this month that "it's almost impossible that we can achieve an acceptable budget" without a property-tax increase. But because Miami-Dade residents saw so much official profligacy during the housing bubble - county commissioners were famous for having cops chauffeur them around town, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in police overtime - Alvarez's suggestion is being met instead by calls to further streamline the county's bloated bureaucracy...
...biggest job is the city's biggest township. Soweto is an acronym for South Western Townships, the banal moniker apartheid-era leaders bestowed on the dormitory city they created for blacks on the edge of town. The apartheid government decided blacks had no need for not only freedom, fair wages and a decent education but also roads, trees and houses. Soweto was a place of tin shacks and red dirt. As part of the effort to redress this legacy of inequality, the mayor has repaved Soweto's main roads, and Williamson invented his extreme park missions...
Whatever Works also owes a debt to The Wizard of Oz. Melody is Dorothy, Boris is the fulminating old wizard, and Oz--well, that has to be Manhattan: Gotham as the Emerald City, full of endearing creatures who make dreams come true. The town has a magical effect on its visitors. Melody picks up some of Boris' dour rhetoric, except that for cretins she says "croutons." Her parents, having followed her trail north, get the feeling too. Her staid father (Ed Begley Jr.) unbuttons his sexual inhibitions, and her Blanche DuBois--like mom (a stingingly funny Patricia Clarkson) becomes...
...Afghan mission is governed by a parliamentary mandate that limits most troops to peacekeeping and reconstruction efforts in the relatively peaceful north of Afghanistan. Even so, at least 35 German soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since early 2002, most recently on Tuesday, when three died near the northern town of Kunduz after their patrol came under fire. The mission is very unpopular back home, but Germany has been feeling pressure from its NATO allies to pull more of its weight and send troops to the south, the scene of fierce battles with Taliban insurgents...
...early on Tuesday, in the dusty and wild northwest town of Dera Ismail Khan, Mehsud appears to have struck first. After rising for dawn prayers, Zainuddin returned to sleep, and was shot dead by one of his own bodyguards who fled the scene in a waiting car. Zainuddin's men believe that the assassin had infiltrated the group and killed their leader on Mehsud's orders - an action widely interpreted in Pakistan to as a message to others to avoid following Zainuddin's path. (See pictures of life beneath the surface in Pakistan...