Word: archipelago
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...shadow of violence and death has hung over the fiercely proud Acehnese for centuries. The province never fully succumbed to rule by the Dutch colonialists who pacified the rest of the Indonesian archipelago, and since 1976, G.A.M. has been fighting doggedly for an independent state. The conflict has already cost the lives of 10,000-20,000 Acehnese...
...decade. The Jakarta Stock Exchange index hit an all-time high in April and foreign-currency reserves are the largest ever at $37 billion. The economy is growing at its fastest rate since 2000, fueled in part by China's soaring demand for commodities?the 17,000-island archipelago is rich in oil, natural gas, gold, copper, nickel, coal, palm oil and rubber. Global confidence in Indonesia's prospects has also improved somewhat. In March, the country successfully raised $1 billion in its first international sovereign-bond issue since the 1997 Asian crisis...
...Taiwan and Vietnam all lay claim to some or all of these reefs and islets. In 1988, the dispute sparked a naval battle between China and Vietnam, in which more than 70 sailors died. In subtler declarations of ownership, Vietnam last week launched a holiday cruise to the barren archipelago, and Taiwan in late March marked its territory by erecting a bird-watching shack on one of the islands. At least there's a sensible money-grubbing reason for some of this squabbling: the Spratlys sit athwart vital shipping lanes, fishing grounds and potentially vast oil and natural-gas fields...
...Asian economy remains a diagram of an extended family tree connecting clans that make things to those that finance them, with dotted lines sometimes leading to the government. The payoff for decades of commercial consanguinity has varied from nation to nation. For more than 30 years the impoverished Indonesian archipelago was run as a mom-and-pop operation by the ruling Suharto family. In contrast, South Korea's economic miracle was engineered by some 30 ambitious conglomerates called chaebol, almost all family controlled, while the commercial drive of industrious Hong Kong and Taiwan emanated from anthills of small, adroit family...
...their escargots can rival the Bahamians' love affair with sea snails. Available in variations from salad to stew to chowder, the flesh of the conch (pronounced konk) is white, sweet and most closely reminiscent in flavor to clam. But in the Bahamas' own original fast food?ubiquitous across the archipelago?the mollusk is turned into a fritter. Made from ground conch meat (it's on the chewy side, so is often minced to tenderize it), onion, bell peppers and hot seasonings mixed with batter and deep fried, conch fritters have an almost indefinable,spicy-with-a-hint-of-the-ocean...