Word: foothold
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...Atlanta is only 18,000 sq. ft., about the size of everything you and all your friends live in put together. But that's still a lot of wall space, which you need if you're Elton John. Ten years ago, around the time he established his U.S. foothold in Atlanta (he also has houses in London and Nice and one of those rolling country estates in Old Windsor, England), Sir Elton, as he is properly called, also discovered photographs. Several million dollars and much shopping later, he has one of the larger private collections in the world...
...recent years the U.S. has sought to improve ties with Yemen, hoping to pressure the government to defuse terrorist cells, draw the country away from its sometime ally Saddam Hussein and gain a foothold at the tip of the Saudi peninsula. Sending Navy ships to refuel in Yemen ports made strategic sense in that regard. "[Diplomacy] was at the heart of the motivation," Admiral Clark said last week. But the diplomacy outstripped the security. Crawling with terrorists who see the U.S. as invaders on the peninsula and protected only by a weak central government located 200 miles to the north...
Lexicographers are to words what INS agents are to immigrants: providers of legal residency. The words may have been in the country already and may have even gained a social foothold ("day trader," "erectile dysfunction"), but they weren't here officially, so to speak. They had to watch over their shoulders for the authorities. Viewed with suspicion by traditionalists because of foreign-sounding names ("keiretsu") or unconventional customs ("air kiss"), such words risked deportation at any moment...
...later this month when it resumes direct talks with North Korea over missiles. Long-term peace on the peninsula would certainly allow the U.S. to remove 37,000 troops from harm's way along the world's most potentially volatile border. But that would also lose Washington a key foothold in any future conflict scenario in the region against either China or Russia...
Despite all the natural resources, the Norse never secured a foothold in the New World. Within a decade or so after Leif's landing at L'Anse aux Meadows, they were gone. Wallace, for one, believes that there were simply too few people to keep the camp going and that those stationed there got homesick: "You had a very small community that could barely sustain itself. Recent research has shown it had only 500 people, and we know you need that many at a minimum to start a colony in an uninhabited area. They had barely got started in Greenland...