Alaska

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<B>Alaska</B></div> <div> <A HREF="alaska_canada_rail_link.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Alaska Canada Rail Link">Alaska Canada Rail Link</A></div> <div> <A HREF="submit_a_complaint.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Submit a Complaint">Submit a Complaint</A></div> <div> <A HREF="conspiracy_theories.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Conspiracy Theories">Conspiracy Theories</A></div> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" width="100%" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" ><B>News and Music Free Radio Stations RadioZX</B></FONT>     |     <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="News and Music Free Radio Stations Radio">home</A>                              back to  <A HREF="hot_news.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Hot News Index">Hot News Index</A></div> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <I><B>Alaska</B></I></div> <div> Can You Really See Russia From Alaska?Yes, but only the boring parts.</div> <div> Culled from  <A HREF="http://www.slate.com/id/2200155/?y=1" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.slate.com/id/2200155/?y=1">Slate</A> By Nina Shen Rastogi</div> <div> Posted Monday, Sept. 15, 2008, at 5:25 PM ET </div> <div> In her Sept. 11 interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson, Sarah Palin had this to say about Russia: "They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska." Is that true?</div> <div> Yes. Russia and Alaska are divided by the Bering Strait, which is about 55 miles at its narrowest point. In the middle of the Bering Strait are two small, sparsely populated islands: Big Diomede, which sits in Russian territory, and Little Diomede, which is part of the United States. At their closest, these two islands are a little less than two and a half miles apart, which means that, on a clear day, you can definitely see one from the other. (To see the view of Big Diomede from Little Diomede, check out this <A HREF="http://www.webcamsk.com/index.php?option=com_bookmarks&task=detail&id=201" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.webcamsk.com/index.php?option">webcam</A>.) The Diomede Islands are often blanketed by persistent fog, which makes visibility difficult. On a clear day, though, a person standing at sea level can see a little less than three miles across the ocean. You can see farther if you go higher—at the highest altitude on Little Diomede (919 feet), you can see for about 37 miles. (Between mid-December and mid-June, when the water between the two islands freezes, an intrepid explorer can just walk from one to the other.) </div> <div> The tactical importance of this proximity is debatable, however: Big Diomede has no permanent population though it does house an important weather station. Alaskans can, however, see into the future from Little Diomede since Big Diomede (or Ratmanov Island, as it's known to the Russians) is on the other side of the <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Date_Line" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internation">International Date Line</A>.</div> <bR> <div> You can also see Russia from other points in Alaska. According to a <A HREF="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFDF103EF930A15753C1A96E948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht"><I>New York Times</I></A><A HREF="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFDF103EF930A15753C1A96E948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht"> article</A> written in the waning years of the Cold War (when the Alaska-Siberia border was known as the "Ice Curtain"), if you stand on high ground on the tip of St. Lawrence Island—a larger Alaskan island in the Bering Sea, southwest of the Diomedes—you can see the Russian mainland, about 37 miles away. The same article claims that you can see Russia from the Tin City Air Force facility at Cape Prince of Wales, which is the westernmost point of the mainland Americas.<B> </B>The station chief at Tin City confirms that, for roughly half the year, you can see Siberian mountain ranges from the highest part of the facility.</div> <div> It's not as if Alaskans can see into the heart of the Kremlin, though. The region you'd be seeing from these vantage points is the <A HREF="http://www.chukotka.org/en/main/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.chukotka.org/en/main/">Chukotka autonomous district</A>, a massive, desolate expanse of about 285,000 square miles with a population of about 55,000. (That's an area roughly the size of Texas<B> </B>with a population the size of Pine Bluff, Ark.) Chukotka has fewer than 400 miles of road and no railroad infrastructure; the population is mostly employed in mining and subsistence hunting. The more strategic areas of the Russian coastline, militarily speaking—the Kamchatka Peninsula, home to a nuclear submarine base, or Vladivostok, headquarters of the Russian Pacific Fleet—are not visible from Gov. Palin's home state.</div> <div> Palin does have Obama beat, though: The closest foreign territory to Hawaii is the Micronesian <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiribati" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiribati">Republic of Kiribati</A>, but at more than 1,000 miles away, it's not remotely visible with the naked eye. </div> <bR> <div> <I>Explainer thanks Stephen Blank of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, Greg Durocher of the Alaska Science Center, Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institute, and Vance Spaulding of the Tin City Long Range Radar Site</I></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>Shocking! 31% Don't Know This. Do You?</B></div> <div> Nearly one-third of Americans cannot name the vice president of the United States. </div> <div> That's the word from a poll released in April 2007 by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. When the same question was asked in 1989, 26 percent could not name Dan Quayle as the vice president. So much for 24-hour TV news and the power of the Internet.</div> <div> <B>The Chicago Tribune reports that the Pew survey of 1,502 adults uncovered the following fun facts about our basic level of political knowledge (or lack thereof):</B></div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">66 percent can correctly name their state's governor, compared with 75 percent who could do that in 1989.</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">49 percent correctly identified Nancy Pelosi as the speaker of the House of Representatives, compared with just 14 percent who could name Tom Foley in 1989.</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">76 percent knew the Democrats controlled the House, compared with 68 percent who answered that correctly 18 years ago.</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">93 percent correctly named Arnold Schwarzenegger either as California's governor or an actor and knew that Hillary Clinton was a senator, presidential candidate or former first lady. </div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">65 percent knew that Condoleezza Rice was the secretary of state.</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Only 15 percent could correctly name Harry Reid as the Senate majority leader.</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">88 percent were aware of President Bush's plan to increase troop levels in Iraq.</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c800000000.png" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Just 33 percent knew that the new minimum wage proposed by Congress is $7.25 an hour. </div> <div> <I>--From the Editors at Netscape</I></div> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>