Word: australian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...China's state-owned aluminum company Chinalco announced it would inject $19.5 billion in cash into Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. More than $12 billion of that will give the Chinese company, which already owns 9% of Rio, a share of some of the mining firm's most valuable mines. The remainder of the cash injection will go into bonds that can eventually be converted into an equity stake, which would double Chinalco's overall ownership position in Rio. The $19.5 billion deal amounts to the largest foreign investment any company in China has ever made. Two days...
...last week's cosmic crack-up were relatively small machines. The Russian ship weighed 1,235 lbs.; the American ship was about a ton. Once that mass is broken up into smaller pieces, the atmosphere ought to do a pretty good job of incinerating it. Skylab did shower the Australian outback with wreckage during its reentry in the summer of 1979, but it weighed a whale-like 91 metric tons; Columbia weighed...
...Fisher, an Australian actress whose breakthrough moment happened around a dinner table with Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers, is a nifty performer. Her charms are enough to keep the movie - entering the marketplace just as the country's financial situation becomes truly dire - from being criminally distasteful. She's got that rare gift for making slapstick seem organic. Confessions runs her through the chick-flick moves of endearment (walk into glass, run in high heels, spill food on self and others), but there are a few scenes where she cuts loose and we get to see her Lucille Ball-style...
...what happens when beauty turns to terror? Australia found out last weekend when wildfires swept through the southeastern state of Victoria. Fires are a regular and natural occurrence in the Australian bush, but nobody was ready for the conflagration that exploded through the forests and towns north of Melbourne, and elsewhere in the state, on Saturday Feb. 7. Fueled by 117 degrees F (47 degrees C) heat and fierce northerly winds, huge fireballs burned through fields, cars, houses, stores and schools...
...signs. The 11th chapter of the second working group of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, warned that fires in Australia were "virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency" because of steadily warming temperatures over the next several decades. Research published in 2007 by the Australian government's own Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization reported that by 2020, there could be up to 65% more "extreme" fire-danger days compared with 1990, and that by 2050, under the most severe warming scenarios, there could be a 300% increase in such days. "[The fires...