Word: bottlenecks
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...along the pavements, keeping low, chased by the sound of gunfire and more explosions. The nearest escape route is 33rd Street, narrow like so many in the downtown area, and it is a seething bottleneck of people - sitting ducks - so I run on and dart up 34th Street. Are they firing over our heads? Not all the time. Not far from where I had been standing lies the body of Japanese cameraman Kenji Nagai, shot dead by a soldier at point-blank range...
...been on a costly and sometimes controversial search for raw materials abroad, it must have been a relief. Last week China issued a report outlining the discovery of large mineral deposits that could significantly reduce its economy's growing dependence on imports. The finds "will fundamentally alleviate the serious bottleneck and big restrictions our country faces with regard to mineral resources," said Meng Xianlai, director of the China Geological Survey...
...orders offered tantalizing clues. There are only a few places in the world where minesweepers top the list of U.S. naval requirements. And every sailor, petroleum engineer and hedge-fund manager knows the name of the most important: the Strait of Hormuz, the 20-mile-wide bottleneck in the Persian Gulf through which roughly 40% of the world's oil needs to pass each day. Coupled with the CNO's request for a blockade review, a deployment of minesweepers to the west coast of Iran would seem to suggest that a much discussed--but until now largely theoretical--prospect...
Next, there is oil. The Persian Gulf, a traffic jam on good days, would become a parking lot. Iran could plant mines and launch dozens of armed boats into the bottleneck, choking off the shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz and causing a massive disruption of oil-tanker traffic. A low-key Iranian mining operation in 1987 forced the U.S. to reflag Kuwaiti oil tankers and escort them, in slow-moving files of one and two, up and down the Persian Gulf. A more intense operation would probably send oil prices soaring above $100 per bbl.--which may explain...
...months has been the prospect of war between the United States and Iran. It's not hard to see why: Iran is the fourth-largest supplier in an already tight world market, and its threat to respond to any attack by closing the Straits of Hormuz - the maritime bottleneck through which oil from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States must pass - could send oil markets into shock. But oil futures fell to just under $64 a barrel this week, from close to $77 a month ago, suggesting that oil markets are not expecting a confrontation with Iran any time soon...