Word: russian
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...amounts of the toxic chemical benzene, creating a 50-mile (80 km) noxious slick. The chemicals oozed toward the sea, and Chinese cities that drank from the Songhua were forced to cut off supplies, leaving millions to fend for themselves. As the slick passed over the border to the Russian city of Khabarovsk, a problem that began in a single Chinese chemical plant suddenly became an international incident between two powerful nations with a history of bad blood...
...down by 33%, and that of the Transport Ministry by 30%. But there is one hugely expensive project on which President Dmitri Medvedev has vowed to actually increase spending: transforming Russia's creaking Soviet-era defense industry into a modern technological power, and turning the 1.1-million-man Russian army into a leaner but more effective fighting force...
...analysis of Russia's military in February by Stratfor, a U.S. company. The upheaval also forced many of Russia's finest engineers to quit for better-paid jobs abroad. Defense factories across Russia lumbered through the 1990s, many of them barely seeing a splash of paint. Meanwhile the Russian army filled its ranks with reluctant conscripts; recent Russian newspaper and government reports have found physical abuse, drug addiction and alcoholism rampant among the poorly trained, disaffected soldiers...
...Russia's superior firepower and its bigger army, its ground offensive was not the overwhelming success it should have been. Moscow's military arsenal lacked anything to match Georgia's Israeli-made spy drones, according to Paul Holtom, senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Indeed, Russian troops operated with no modern surveillance or night-vision equipment at all, according to Russian Duma hearings last October. Says Vadim Kozyulin, head of the conventional-arms program at the Center for Policy Studies in Moscow: "Our army was modern at the end of the 1980s. Since then...
...among us has not mocked a mime? Those mordant, white-faced pierrots, especially of the Russian variety, are usually about as funny as Dostoevsky, as buoyant as Brezhnev. Even passionate Cirque fans - who love the company's acrobats and plate-spinners, its mix of traditional circus and modern theatrical sorcery - have wished that the clowns would be sent out, and the Mime Safety Board called in. Over the years, in seeming response to public disfavor, the Cirque brass has severely reduced the time given to clowns. They were prominent in early traveling shows like Saltimbanco and Alegria, then mere supporting...