Cash flows to stock and bond mutual funds have gained strength in the last two months, but fund managers have not been eager to invest the new money, instead of preferring to raise the cash levels in their portfolios at the highest level in six months.

Most states impose limitations on the authority of the legislature to borrow money, with their objectives being to protect taxpayers and the credit of the state government.

In contrast to environmentalists' proposals to limit emissions of certain pollutants, the administration proposed calling for mandatory restrictions of only three such pollutants from power plants-mercury, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides and the plan would delay such cuts until 2010 or later.

In California, a lack of genetic variation in the Argentine ant has allowed the species to spread widely; due to their being so genetically similar to one another, the ants consider all their fellows to be a close relative and thus do not engage in the kind of fierce intercolony struggles that limits the spread of this species in its native Argentina.

Tom Bradley was mayor of Los Angeles from 1973 to 1993, an era when the city had transformed from a collection of suburban neighborhoods to the second-largest city in the United States.

Seldom more that 40 feet wide and 12 feet deep, but it ran 363 miles across the rugged wilderness of upstate New York, the Erie Canal connected the Hudson River at Albany to the Great Lakes at Buffalo, providing the port of New York City with a direct water link to the heartland of the North American continent.

Elk now live almost solely in the Rocky Mountains, which would make it seem that elk are mountain dwellers, while they once ranged over virtually all of the continental United States except for a small strip in the extreme Southwest.

In addition to being China's first administrators, in the sense that they developed a coherent bureaucracy for their empire, the first literate culture in East Asia were the Shang, and they were well known for crafting ornate bronze ritual vessels.

Books in European libraries last longer than books in libraries in the United States because, although the climate in Europe is fairly humid, libraries there are not subjected to the extremes of temperature and humidity that damage collections in the United States.

When a ton of wheat was being moved from Buffalo to New York City before the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, it took three weeks and cost $100, but when the canal was used, it took less than eight days and cost less than $6.