More important, the city offers reliable sunshine and blue skies when much of Europe and America is dark and grey.

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The heat of the summer has abated and the city sparkles in warm sunshine.

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But for now, G24's factory in Cardiff, not a city known for its sunshine, remains powered by a wind turbine.

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In Duyun, another city in Guizhou, workers at one Sunshine enterprise stitch together baseballs, and at another they make cloth gloves.

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Dundee City has the lowest average annual rainfall (775 mm) while residents of Aberdeen City enjoy, on average, the most sunshine hours per week at 28.4 hours.

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For 2 million Utah residents, there is no escape except to the snow-capped mountains that gleam in the sunshine thousands of feet higher, or to resort towns like Park City, where the Sundance Film Festival is under way.

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Leaving the warm Virginia sunshine outside and walking into the bulk-buy Costco store in Pentagon City, it's easy to spot the Christmas aisles.

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These days, Perth is a vibrant cosmopolitan city which still enjoys Mediterranean climate and rightly claims to offer more hours of sunshine than any other Australian state capital.

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Sunshine Flint's "Vegas glitz without the gambling" looks beyond the craps table at the city's newest high-end options for dinner, nightlife and spa pampering.

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