Hints and tips:
...Then came the 2008 financial crisis, and the city was one of the principal outposts of America’s housing bust....
...I currently live in the state of Alabama, but that’s a new place for me....
...So far it doesn’t seem like that,” says PS Sriraj, director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago....
...At a hearing in Michigan in late October, dozens of speakers attacked the plan. “The rules have changed, and now rural America is losing,” testified Brian Duncan, a farmer from north-west Illinois....
...Kaplan writes: “We are dealing here with forces too large for the United States to control.” Kaplan believes America is “fated to lead”....
...Its memo highlighted the economic woes of the Appalachian regions of West Virginia and Kentucky, the heart of coal country, but acknowledged that distress had spread to Illinois and western coal states such...
...The National Weather Service predicted a 10 per cent chance of tornadoes in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois....
...The state of New Mexico is larger than the entire United Kingdom yet has just 2m people, most of them in the comparatively fertile north....
...population growth in the Mountain West state....
...America still has vast tracts of wilderness, especially out west....
...So there are such charming but disgraceful confections as the 34th state senate district of New York (“the dangling lobster tail”) and the 17th congressional district of Illinois (“the rabbit on a skateboard...
...It does have some beautiful bits, from the Kremlin through to the masterworks of revolutionary modernism but the legacy of the communist police state hangs heavy....
...Some 18 per cent of America’s output comes from its three largest metropolitan areas while Greater London is more than 50 per cent more productive than the rest of the UK....
...James Drummond is the FT’s Gulf news editor...
...China, he asserts, “poses the most serious challenge to the United States since the half-century cold war struggle with the Soviets”....
...Over the course of two hours, highways disappeared under meadows, collapsing cities turned into verdant hillocks and automobiles crumbled into dust. It was macabre but riveting....
...His world isn’t the la-la-land of Hollywood, however, but the geek-land of Silicon Valley. He grew up in Connecticut and arrived on the west coast via Chicago....
...place in America....
...In their view, to be an African-American you must be a descendent of slaves who were brought from west Africa to the United States....
...One overriding impression, not new but reinforced, is the sheer emptiness of the plains states....
...of the Americas a millennium ago....
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