Word: sea
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...Visvaldis Lacis, an 83-year-old author and parliamentarian, recalls that under Soviet rule the kgb stopped every ship entering and leaving the harbor to check for spies and stowaways. Lacis now watches as a black and red Cypriot-flagged container ship slides by on its way to the sea. "This," he marvels, "is freedom...
Riga's revival is part of a broader expansion that has buoyed the Baltic Sea region, an area that comprises about 70 million people living in nine countries bordering the sea. Established players like Sweden and Finland are pairing up with emerging economies (and recent E.U. inductees) like Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia to transform a region once better known for herring, bad weather and cold war naval maneuvers into a global economic dynamo. "It's a hot spot for growth," says Peter Egardt, a Swede who heads the Business Advisory Council at the intergovernmental Council of Baltic Sea States...
...growing faster than the E.U. average; where several, including Latvia, which last year expanded 11.9%, are topping the European table; and where trade is expected to soar 50% by 2020. The port at Hamburg, just west of Heiligendamm, has seen a 40% increase in cargo shipped through the Baltic Sea in each of the past three years. As host of the summit, Germany has proposed a comprehensive agenda for world leaders ranging from more aid to Africa to persuading the U.S. to agree to a timetable for addressing climate change. But the meeting will also stress the importance of lowering...
...1990s, only 1,000 ships entered the port each year; now more than 3,600 do so. Hermanis Cernovs, a naturalized Latvian born in Russia, has witnessed the transformation at first hand. When the Iron Curtain fell, he was commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine. Today, he organizes joint sea-rescue exercises with France, Sweden and the U.S. as the head of the Latvian coast guard. "The changes of the past decade were very, very fast," he says in English, the region's new lingua franca. "They were completely unexpected...
...computer code written by Estonians. Established multinationals, meanwhile, such as Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Ikea, with their global customer networks, strengthened the region's links to the outside world. And never underestimate the dumb luck of geography: 90% of the world's trade is still transported by sea, and the Baltic is the major marine waterway of Eastern Europe. At a recent meeting of Baltic states, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt joked that the region possessed in its various countries all the components of an ideal economy - the Baltics' pro-growth policies, Finland's gift for innovation, Norway...