Word: summers
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...usually reserved for non-controversial matters like Post Office namings and symbolic resolutions, the leadership will occasionally try and sneak substantive bills through the process, and the Steering Committee scrubs the daily list of UCs for objectionable items. DeMint, for example, objected to 10 bills just before the Congressional summer break in August. The measures, which covered the Health and Human Services Administration, Justice and Transportation departments, included a total of $66 billion in discretionary spending and $281 billion in mandatory spending. "This is stuff they want to do without debate and without a vote," DeMint said. To underline DeMint...
...Moscow these days is who will follow Putin as President. Unlike in Washington, there are no unauthorized leaks. There are few off-the-record chats. So when Putin named a little-known financial investigator named Viktor Zubkov Prime Minister, it surprised everyone. State-owned TV had spent the summer giving huge amounts of exposure to two tough-guy Putin proteges who seemed the likely successors, but Zubkov's appointment, first described as a feint, is now looking like an actual succession...
...flame suddenly appeared in the Arctic twilight over the Barents Sea, bathing the low clouds over the Norwegian port of Hammerfest in a spectral orange glow. With a tremendous roar, the flame bloomed over the windswept ocean and craggy gray rocks, competing for an instant with the Arctic summer's never-setting sun. The first flare-off of natural gas from the Snohvit (Snow White in Norwegian) gas field, some 90 miles (145 km) offshore, was a beacon of promise: After 25 years of false starts, planning and construction, the first Arctic industrial oil-and-gas operation outside of Alaska...
...This summer, however, saw something new: for the first time in recorded history, the Northwest Passage was ice-free all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The Arctic ice cap's loss through melting this year was 10 times the recent annual average, amounting to an area greater than that of Texas and New Mexico combined. The Arctic has never been immune from politics; during the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet submarines navigated its frigid waters. But now that global warming has rendered the Arctic more accessible than ever - and yet at the same time more fragile...
...very large fraction of that won't be developed." But for now, such downbeat assessments are being shrugged off. Just as global warming has made it easier to get to the Arctic, so high oil prices have made it worth the hassle of doing so. This summer's activities were, in essence, attempts to claim the rights to seabeds that few considered worth a walrus's whiskers a generation ago, when oil was cheap and the ice was thick...