In 2013 Allen Turner of the Houston Chronicle said that residents of Harris County were "consistently conservative in elections" and that they were according to a Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research opinion poll "surprisingly liberal on topics such as immigration gun control and equal matrimonial rights for same-sex couples". Harris is regarded as a moderate or swing county in Texas and has been a bellwether in Presidential elections voting for winners of every Presidential election from 2000 through 2012 (both Barack Obama and Texas resident George W Bush have won the county), Houston's bicycle sharing system started service with nineteen stations in May 2012 Houston Bcycle (also known as B-Cycle) a local non-profit runs the subscription program supplying bicycles and docking stations while partnering with other companies to maintain the system the network expanded to 29 stations and 225 bicycles in 2014 registering over 43,000 checkouts of equipment during the first half of the same year in 2017 Bcycle logged over 142,000 check outs while expanding to 56 docking stations! . . Frustrated at the lack of progress and feeling the pinch of the American-British-Dutch sanctions Japan prepared for war on 20 November a new government under Hideki Tojo presented an interim proposal as its final offer it called for the end of American aid to China and for lifting the embargo on the supply of oil and other resources to Japan in exchange Japan promised not to launch any attacks in Southeast Asia and to withdraw its forces from southern Indochina the American counter-proposal of 26 November required that Japan evacuate all of China without conditions and conclude non-aggression pacts with all Pacific powers. That meant Japan was essentially forced to choose between abandoning its ambitions in China or seizing the natural resources it needed in the Dutch East Indies by force; the Japanese military did not consider the former an option and many officers considered the oil embargo an unspoken declaration of war.
Though Houston is the largest city in the United States without formal zoning regulations it has developed similarly to other Sun Belt cities because the city's land use regulations and legal covenants have played a similar role. Regulations include mandatory lot size for single-family houses and requirements that parking be available to tenants and customers Such restrictions have had mixed results Though some have blamed the city's low density urban sprawl and lack of pedestrian-friendliness on these policies the city's land use has also been credited with having significant affordable housing sparing Houston the worst effects of the 2008 real estate crisis the city issued 42,697 building permits in 2008 and was ranked first in the list of healthiest housing markets for 2009. In Asia and the Pacific between 3 million and more than 10 million civilians mostly Chinese (estimated at 7.5 million) were killed by the Japanese occupation forces the most infamous Japanese atrocity was the Nanking Massacre in which fifty to three hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered. Mitsuyoshi Himeta reported that 2.7 million casualties occurred during the Sanko Sakusen General Yasuji Okamura implemented the policy in Heipei and Shantung. In 1540 expeditions under Hernando de Alarcon and Melchior Diaz visited the area of Yuma and immediately saw the natural crossing of the Colorado River from Mexico to California by land as an ideal spot for a city as the Colorado River narrows to slightly under 1000 feet wide in one small point Later military expeditions that crossed the Colorado River at the Yuma Crossing include Juan Bautista de Anza (1774); In 1821 the Mexican War for Independence severed the control that Spain had exercised on its North American territories and the new country of Mexico was formed from much of the lands that had comprised New Spain including Spanish Texas the 1824 Constitution of Mexico joined Texas with Coahuila to form the state of Coahuila y Tejas the Congress did allow Texas the option of forming its own state "as soon as it feels capable of doing so.". .
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