Word: baltic
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...leaders of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania also pressed ahead with their challenge to Gorbachev, possibly hoping to make their case an issue at the summit. The presidents of the three republics met on May 12 in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to form a united front by reviving the Baltic Council, a policy-coordinating body that dates from before World War II. They sent a letter to Gorbachev asking for joint negotiations on independence. Gorbachev responded last week with two decrees that said the Baltic states were violating the Soviet constitution...
...Riga that same day, Russian military officers and cadets in civilian clothes marched in front of the Latvian parliament. President Anatolijs Gorbunovs agreed to accept a petition from the Russians and to set up a commission to deal with their grievances. Most Baltic nationalists assume, however, that the demonstrators' real intention is to maintain Moscow's control rather than protect the rights of ethnic Russians...
...otherwise clear day, one can see whole valleys enveloped in a heavy blue haze from the belching smokestacks that disfigure the landscape. Littered across the East bloc, obsolete and unsafe nuclear reactors are decaying, each threatening a reprise of the 1986 Chernobyl accident. The Danube River and Baltic Sea are deadly sumps. Many lakes and streams are fishless, forests are dying, and blackened cities are decorated with pollution-eroded sculpture...
Eastern Europe's majestic waterways, fouled by sewage, toxic chemicals and acid rain, are in no better shape. Fish catches in the Baltic Sea, long a dumping ground for industrial wastes from Poland, East Germany and Lithuania, are declining dramatically, and summer bathing is in jeopardy. The Vistula River, which runs through Poland, is so laden with poisons and corrosive chemicals that stretches are considered unusable for factory coolant systems, much less for drinking water. The Danube is endangered at every turning by runoff from nitrogen-rich agricultural fertilizers and by the industrial plants that discharge along its banks, from...
Among the more ominous environmental threats is the possibility of accidents at the two dozen Soviet-built nuclear plants in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary. Last January the East German government acknowledged that in late 1975 a network of cables caught fire at its Greifswald complex on the Baltic Sea and nearly caused a reactor meltdown. Though a disaster was averted, the country is considering major cuts in its nuclear-energy output. In Poland's Baltic ports, dockers refuse to handle Soviet-made parts for the country's first nuclear power station, which has been under construction...