Word: horning
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During the 1880s, Bunau-Varilla worked for a private French company that attempted to dig a canal through the muddy, mosquito-filled tropical jungle of Panama, then a province of Colombia. Any canal across Central America would have eliminated the 7,000-mile journey around Cape Horn for ships navigating between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. At the time, most U.S. engineers favored a canal at sunny Nicaragua. The crossing there would have been 131 miles longer than at the 50-mile Isthmus of Panama. But almost all of the extra miles would have required no digging, since a Nicaraguan...
...walked strange, like a cat" approached her on the sidewalk, looked directly into her face, then passed. She said he held his right arm down stiffly, as though he were carrying something partly up his sleeve. Five minutes later she heard shots and the wail of a car horn. Next day, learning of the double shooting, she was certain the passing stranger had been the killer. When detectives questioned her, she recalled another vital detail: she had seen a cop tagging a cream-colored car parked illegally near a fire hydrant one block from the murder site...
...flag of the Somali Democratic Republic-at the Horn of Africa-proudly bears a five-pointed star: one point for each of the five regions in which the predominantly nomadic Somalis live. The problem is that only two of these five regions are inside the borders of the republic. The other three belong to Somalia's neighbors-Ethiopia, Kenya and the newly independent state of Djibouti-and Somalia has designs on all of them. Last week, after 16 years of sporadic fighting, it looked as if the Somalis might be on the verge of winning their third star...
...resolved to retain the territory they acquired during a century of expansion. The Eritreans, whose land was an Italian colony until 1941, are fighting for independence; the Somalis are pursuing their dream of uniting the various Somali homelands under one flag. But these conflicts also have international significance. The Horn of Africa, lying beside the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the oil routes between the Persian Gulf and Europe, is of enormous strategic importance to the superpowers...
Similar shifts in alignments are taking place to the north, west and east of the Horn. Egypt has thrown off its Soviet influence. So has the Sudan, which is currently aiding the Eritrean secessionists in Ethiopia even though its Soviet-furnished army and air force are short of equipment; the Sudanese suffered considerable losses while putting down an attempted coup last year that allegedly was backed by Libya, the most steadfast of the remaining Soviet clients in the region. Libya, of course, has just finished fighting a weekend war with Egypt, which abrogated its friendship treaty with Moscow only last...