Word: mediterranean
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sailing ships have crisscrossed oceans since the Egyptians first ventured out into the Red Sea and the Mediterranean about 3000 B.C. But the last sail-powered cargo ship left the seaways in the 1950s. The development of diesel engines, cheap fuel, tight shipping schedules and the expense of large crews to handle the sails eventually ended the era of sailing cargo ships. But now the economics of transportation are changing. Marine engine fuel, which accounts for 25% to 30% of a ship's operating costs, has gone up over 400% in the past seven years...
...drug pipeline from the Golden Crescent has few leaks. Raw opium is converted in makeshift laboratories near the fields into a more compact morphine base that is smuggled aboard freighters in Syria or Lebanon for shipment to Mediterranean ports, mainly in Sicily. There it is converted into heroin in secret laboratories controlled by Mafia dons with close family and business ties to their counterparts in the U.S. Almost all of Sicily's heroin-as much as three tons a year-is infiltrated into the U.S. by couriers on ostensibly legitimate flights, usually from Palermo to New York...
...Supply. Within days of the outbreak of heavy fighting, oil shipments from Iraq and Iran were suspended, including crude deliveries through Iraq's pipelines to the Mediterranean. Between them, the two nations export just over 3 million bbl. per day, around 20% of gulf crude shipments, an amount that would not necessarily be critical at a time of a global oil glut. But there was the dire possibility that the Strait of Hormuz, 30 miles wide at its narrowest point, at the southern end of the gulf, might be closed because of the hostilities. Halting the flow...
...Europe, thanks largely to the pioneering work of the Grimms (in Germany) and Alexander Afanasyev (in Russia). Calvino's collection throws open a sunny window to the south. A tale told in the Black Forest differed, apparently, from the one that was related on the shores of the Mediterranean. The three little pigs did not make it to Italy; they became three grownup girls named Catherine, Julia and Marietta. Italian bards had little interest in the violence and gore that sometimes make for such grimm reading. When the good characters are afflicted, they feel sadness but not pain...
...Cambridge. Page after page chronicles the arrival and subsequent slow climb of the Irish, the Black and the Portuguese immigrants, with only occasional reference to Italians. And yet, their influence in the city is clear--large parts are predominantly Italian, the sounds and smells unmistakably reminiscent of the Mediterranean...