Word: platform
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...flying toward the United States, the SBX had been scheduled to report for duty in Alaska in early 2006, but a series of structural repairs and upgrades have kept it in warmer waters. For over a year, the nine-story radar that sits atop a self-propelled Norwegian oil platform has been coming and going from Pearl Harbor for fixes and tests - a delay critics see as symptomatic of an agency under pressure to deliver a national missile defense system that is still more fiction than fact...
...program has already touched many parts of the globe: The radar's prototype was built in the Marshall Islands; its semi-submersible converted oil rig platform was designed in Norway. The two parts were assembled in Texas, its 50,000 tons hoisted onto a ship, and sailed 15,000 miles around the tip of South America (it was too big to use the Panama Canal), arriving in Pearl Harbor in January 2006. Its ultimate destination is the more challenging waters of Adak, a farflung outpost in Alaska's Aleutian island chain, famous for terrible weather and 100-foot waves...
...question. The upside is mobility; the downside is salt water, wind and waves. Shortly after arriving in Hawaii, the MDA ordered an assessment of the radar's rig, which resulted in a $27-million to-do list before it could be declared operational. Improvements include everything from rethinking the platform's ballast system to installing anti-slip surfaces on its decks. In short, at the time when it was originally supposed to be in service, the vessel was not fit for the open sea - and that much was obvious even in Hawaii, not the harsh Bering Sea. "When you read...
...That would be a mistake for a party that has yet to earn the full trust of many Japanese. A welded-together assortment of disparate ideologies, the DPJ can barely agree with itself, let alone present a coherent platform to voters. Once the standard-bearer for young urbanites and reform, under Ozawa the party has styled itself as a defender of rural Japan, promising subsidies and protectionism for farmers. That was a winning strategy - in the July 29 election, the DPJ swept the countryside, once an LDP stronghold - but it contradicts the beliefs of reform-oriented DPJ members. The party...
...days. That appears a slim hope. For one thing, the rebels are a fractious bunch. On Monday, a new split was reported in the ranks of the hardline Islamic Justice and Equality Movement (J.E.M.) over who would represent them in Arusha. And even if they can agree a common platform, the Sudanese government still has to agree to meet them. Khartoum's preferred method of dealing with Darfuris can be guessed at by this week's announcement from the World Food Program that gunmen have attacked nine food convoys across Darfur in the last two weeks, as many...