Word: helling
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Anton Chekhov once visited Sakhalin Island to report on the condition of its prisoners and left a tagline unlikely to be adopted by the tourist bureau - if there were one: "Now I have seen Sakhalin, which is hell." And this from an author famous for understatement. Exiled at the far eastern end of the Russian Federation, just north of Japan, Sakhalin Island was where imperial Russia once sent some of its most unfortunate convicts, on a journey that was usually one-way. In Soviet times it became a closed military base; site of the notorious shooting down of Korean...
...Chekhov's hell become red-hot? The answer is oil, lots of it, along with enough natural gas to power Tokyo - which, actually, is where most of it will be going. Sakhalin Energy (SE), an international consortium led by Shell and the Russia's state-owned Gazprom, is spending $20 billion to mine the waters around Sakhalin; one executive says the island could eventually become as important to the industry as the Gulf of Mexico. SE is finishing a pair of underground 500-mile pipelines down the spine of the island that will deliver oil and natural...
...boom in a manner familiar to many citizens of oil-rich nations. "I'm a native," says Vasili Plotnikov, a pensioner who owns a tiny country shack just a few miles from the massive LNG terminal. "I don't see any plus. I only see negatives." Maybe Chekhov's hell wasn't so bad, after...
...Vladimir Putin for urgent firefighting assistance (a fleet of water-bombers, helicopters and amphibious planes). Retinues of state officials were also dispatched to blaze-hit regions to assess the damage as socialist opponents riled against the government's handling of the crisis, billing it "catastrophic in this season of hell." With millions of Athenians fleeing the capital for a few weeks of summer respite, such fiery debate, say pundits, will peter out. But with an election due in the coming months, the authorities will be forced to take drastic steps to prepare for next summer. And in the mean time...
...early '40s he applied for a writing job at Svensk Filmindustri, the main movie studio in Sweden, and was interviewed by Stina Bergman, widow of playwright Hjalmar Bergman and head of the studio's script department. "He seemed to emerge with a scornful laugh from the darkest corner of Hell," she later recalled, but with "a charm so deadly that after a couple of hours' conversation, I had to have three cups of coffee to get back to normal." She hired Ingmar that...