Word: isthmus
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...remains one of the engineering marvels of the world. At one end of the 50-mile-long waterway, the 12,000 ships that traverse it annually are lifted 85 ft. above sea level by a series of locks, enabling them to sail through the mountainous spine of the Panama Isthmus. When they reach the opposite coast, another set of locks floats them gently back down to the ocean...
Ever since 1914, when U.S. engineers connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by carving a 43-mile-long canal across the Isthmus of Panama, the two ! countries have been intimately linked. So great is American influence that the U.S. dollar is legal currency in Panama. Yet Panamanians are extremely sensitive to any slight from their northern neighbors, especially since their nation is due to take over full jurisdiction of the canal at the end of 1999. Thus diplomats scurried for cover last June, when Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, an opponent of the controversial 1977 treaty that turned over...
...long imagined that a showdown in Central America might begin that way, and Washington was assembling a fleet of 39 warships for counteraction on the other side of the isthmus. On D day next Tuesday, 2,000 Marines will storm ashore from amphibious assault craft onto an isolated strip of sand near Puerto Castilla, on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. They will secure a beachhead for troops of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, who will be flown in by helicopter the following day. By the end of next week, about 10,000 American troops will have gone into action...
...Navy SEAL commandos in Viet Nam, maintains that if memories of the ordeal in Southeast Asia were not still so strong, "we'd be in Nicaragua now." In Congress, Kerrey's fellow Democrats fret that the Administration's commitment to resist the spread of Marxist revolution throughout the isthmus could eventually bog down American troops in another endless jungle guerrilla...
...Trust is the basis of Isthmus theater, trusts in yourself and trust in the group," said Eric D. Ronis '86, an actor in Isthmus...