1963: Three of the four nuclear powers sign a limited treaty that bans most, but not all, nuclear weapons testing.
The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in Moscow by the United States, Soviet Union and Great Britain. The fourth nation to possess “the bomb,” France, did not sign the treaty. Nor did China, which [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Siberia’
Aug. 5, 1963: Finally, a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
August 5th, 2009 |
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Now action man Putin dives world’s deepest lake
August 1st, 2009 |
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Vladimir Putin has dived to the bottom of the world’s deepest lake in Siberia, aboard a mini-submarine.
The Russian prime minister descended 1,400m (4,600ft) in a four-and-a-half hour mission to inspect crystals containing natural gas.
Mr Putin said it was a very special feeling and he had not seen anything like it before.
The mission is likely to add to the 56-year-old’s carefully cultivated image as a man of action.
However, as he emerged after the dive, Mr Putin quickly played down reporters’ suggestions that his next challenge would be to travel in space.
"There is enough work on earth," he said.
‘Plankton soup’
Lake Baikal in Siberia is a UN world heritage site. The largely untouched lake bed contains deposits of clathrate hydrate – crystals packed with natural gas.
Experts say the reserves of methane could rival some of the largest deposits in the world, although mineral extraction is banned.
"What I saw impressed me," the Russian leader said. "With my own eyes I could see how Baikal is, in all its grandeur, in all its greatness.
But Mr Putin expressed some surprise at how murky the water was. And while he realised it was clean from an "ecological point of view", he described it more as a "plankton soup".
Mr Putin arrived for his dive a day after clipping a satellite transmitter onto a Beluga whale on Chkalov island in Russia’s far east.
These acts are the latest in a series that have helped create something of a macho image for the former KGB spy.
While president, Mr Putin was famously photographed on holiday angling, stripped to the waist and wearing a pair of combat trousers.
As well as being a judo black belt, he has also taken to the sky in a fighter jet, shot a Siberian tiger with a tranquilliser gun, and been pictured astride a Mongolian horse. </p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Language barrier
July 15th, 2009 |
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My grandmother taught me Polish. After her death, I stopped speaking it. Then, 40 years later, my childhood language resurfaced
As a child growing up in Derby in the 60s I spoke Polish beautifully, thanks to my grandmother. While my mother went out to work, my grandmother, who spoke no English, looked after me, teaching me to speak her native tongue. Babcia, as we called her, dressed in black with stout brown shoes, wore her grey hair in a bun, and carried a walking stick. She was the hub of our household – she could cook Polish delicacies, play Chopin on the piano and make paper storks. I adored her.
My father, Jerzy, had escaped from Poland after the Germans invaded, travelling on foot across Europe to England, where he became a pilot in the RAF. At the end of the war, he met my English mother at a dance organised by my maternal grandfather to help lonely young Polish pilots. In 1957, he arranged for my grandmother, Maria, who was living in a tiny flat in Warsaw in increasing distress under the privations of communism, to come to the UK.
Like other Polish families in the area, we spent our weekends in the vast Polish club that kept our community’s culture alive. My father helped to establish Dom Polski (Polish House) in the 1950s and it was known as the air force club because the founders were pilots. It provided a focus for all those old comrades and their history. I remember one woman at the club who had a concentration camp number tattooed on her arm, and another whose husband and daughter got off the train transporting them to Siberia to buy bread, only for the train to leave without them. She never saw them again. There were people who had been taken east through Russia as slave labour, others who were taken west to provide a workforce for German farms and factories.
The walls of the club were covered with black-and-white photos of Polish pilots, and a huge propeller from a Spitfire was fixed to one wall. On Saturday mornings my sisters and I would study Polish at the school it ran, and on Saturday nights, my parents would go dancing. On Sundays, we played tombola there over lunch.
But my love affair with Polish culture began to fade when I was five – the year Babcia died. We had been so close that when she was dying, her last words were to ask that I should be looked after. I couldn’t believe she was dead, and went from being confident and cocky to a very quiet child.
Without Babcia’s childcare, my mother had to give up her full-time job and take part-time work in a school across the road. I was placed in the reception class and, accustomed to being at home alone with Babcia, I hated it. I don’t remember making a conscious decision, but in shock I refused to speak Polish until I saw Babcia again.
My sisters and I continued to go to Polish school, but the language would not return. Despite the efforts of my father, even a family trip to Poland in 1965 could not bring it back. When six years later my father died too, at just 53, our Polish connection almost ceased to exist. I left Derby and went to university in London. I never spoke Polish, never ate Polish food nor visited Poland. My childhood was gone and almost forgotten.
Then in 2004, more than 30 years later, things changed again. A new wave of Polish immigrants had arrived and I began to hear the language of my childhood all around me – every time I got on a bus. I saw Polish news-papers in the capital and Polish food for sale in the shops. The language sounded so familiar yet somehow distant – as if it were something I tried to grab but was always out of reach.
In Derby, Dom Polski had closed down. The building was decaying and up for rent; the old soldiers and air force men were almost all dead, and the second and third generations too busy to worry about it. But my memory had been jogged. I began to write a novel about a fictional Polish family and, at the same time, decided to enrol at a Polish language school.
Each week I went through half-remembered phrases, getting bogged down in the intricate grammar and impossible inflections. When my book was published, it put me back in touch with schoolfriends who like me were second-generation Polish. And strangely, in my language classes, I still had my accent and I found words and phrases would sometimes come unbidden, long lost speech patterns making a sudden reappearance. I had found my childhood again •
Joanna Czechowska
The Black Madonna of Derby is published by Silkmill Press at £7.99 (also available in Polish under the title Goodbye Polsko)
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Having tea with Russia’s Deripaska
July 15th, 2009 |
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Russian billonaire, Oleg Deripaska, normally tries to avoid the media spotlight. But Tim Whewell was able to spend some time with him and gain an insight into his life.
Having spent a couple of days in the company of the 164th (until recently ninth) richest person in the world, I can report that he knows an awful lot about the properties of silver foil, plans to make Russia into a nation of white-van lovers, and is partial, late of an evening, to a cup of special Siberian herbal tea.
I can report nothing about the view from his spectacular yacht, the Queen K, where he famously entertained Lord Mandelson, the speed of his private jet, or the furnishings in any of his many homes – because that was not the "vulgar" subject matter the Aluminium King of Russia, Oleg Deripaska, had in mind when he invited me on a private tour of his empire.
No. We were going to roll up our sleeves, put on our safety glasses and hard hats – and talk production.
We were interested in the source of wealth, not its trappings.
In the 85% automation level on the assembly line at GAZ, his car plant at Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga – the 3,200 welding spots on his latest model, the Volga Siber – the accuracy on his quality control apparatus of one micron – a thousandth of a millimetre, the 415,000 amp current that electrolyses the alumina at his smelter in Sayanogorsk in southern Siberia – do not stand too close – and the scorching 730 degrees Celsius inside the furnace.
These are statistics to conjure with, not those you may have heard before about Mr Deripaska – how he was worth $28bn (£17.5bn) last year and only $3.5bn (£2.1bn) now.
In any case, he disputes those figures.
He never had anything like as much as they say, and anyway, he parries jovially as we sit back in his company’s Swiss-style chalet high in the Sayan Mountains, do I know how much money I have got
Touche! I am stuck.
On the one hand, I feel a certain moral obligation to stand up for that portion of the world’s population that does need to keep abreast of its financial affairs.
On the other hand, do I really want my new friend to think I am some kind of Fagin, sitting up half the night over piles of pennies
Mineral exploration
From this you will probably have gathered that Mr Deripaska and I quickly established an easy, bantering relationship.
He not only looks much younger than his 41 years, he is positively boyish in his energy and enthusiasms.
And so we bound down the assembly line at GAZ discussing axles and suspension, touching on the benefits of the Toyota Management System, debating why Britain lets its engineering talent go to waste.
Later in the week, four time-zones to the east, he diverts his helicopter to take me low over the breath-taking Sayano-Shushenskaya dam, once the highest in the world, the source of all those amps in the smelter.
All the time he is pointing down excitedly at the spruce-covered hillsides, telling me what geologists might find next under Siberia.
He has cornered the market in aluminium, but that is not enough. Down there is copper. Further on, molybdenum.
The helicopter’s nice, furnished with cream leather sofas. But we are asked not to film it. For security reasons and also, you will remember, because that is not the kind of thing we are interested in on this trip.
He tells me about all the extra trees he is going to plant around his factory, down where the mountains meet the bare steppe. He tells me about the computers he is giving to schools.
Becoming friends
Only late at night in the chalet – and Mr Deripaska likes late nights – do we turn briefly to darker, more emotional matters.
"Why," he asks suddenly and insistently, "do the British press hate Peter Mandelson so much"
And again I am stuck. Because while I can think of many possible answers to this question – all intriguing enough to occupy a happy hour over a pint down at my local – I am talking now to Peter’s friend, a guy I am trying to bond with.
And so we return to the subject of whether his light commercial vehicle, the Gazelle, could have been improved by technology from the British firm he once owned, LDV.
I will be honest. I am not very interested in vans.
But I liked Oleg Deripaska.
I liked his teasing grin. I liked his ready laughter. And I appreciated his delicacy in not wining and dining me.
Our trip to Siberia was good for both our reputations – because, in these stern days of expense-related scandals, I have almost nothing to declare – only his herbal tea, the master-class in foil making, the unforgettable swoop in the helicopter – oh, and a tiny souvenir ingot of the first aluminium from his smelter.
As for a journey on a gigantic yacht – as Frank Sinatra almost sang in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" – I am so glad I did not.
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