Word: port
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...plenty of funds to bribe Jordanian officials and purchase goods abroad, including luxury items to buy the continued loyalty of military and security officers in Baghdad. His agents forge export licenses, issue phony letters of credit for the front companies, and pay shipment costs to Aqaba's free port. There cargoes supposedly destined for Jordanian companies are loaded onto trucks bound for Iraq. "Saddam is willing to pay a high price," says Jawad Anani, former Jordanian Trade Minister, "and plenty of people here were willing to take high risks in return for the promise of hefty profits." Basil Jardeneh, Jordan...
...approach this teeming, impacted port that Joan Maragall, Barcelona's greatest turn-of-the-century poet and grandfather of the city's present mayor, Pasqual Maragall, called la gran encisera -- the great enchantress? Only in terms of its own history -- one not always shared with the rest of Spain, and often in opposition to it. Barcelona is a very old city, founded by the Romans late in the 1st century B.C.; their massive walls, topped by medieval additions, still encircle its core...
...important town; the Roman capital of what is now Catalunya was farther south, at Tarragona. But Barcelona began to gain significance after the Roman Empire collapsed and the invading Visigoths took over, and it became a capital in the 9th century A.D., when Charlemagne's heirs conquered the city port, threw out the Arabs who had taken charge of it as the northern extension of the Arab conquest of Spain, and then in effect turned it over to a Catalan strongman, Wilfred the Hairy, the semilegendary founder of the Catalan state...
...outward thrust created a Mediterranean trading empire that stretched from the coast of North Africa to the gates of Byzantium. With the money this brought home, a city grew: the greatest Spanish city of the Middle Ages. Even today the Barri Gotic, or Old City, of Barcelona, facing the port, contains in its winding alleys more functioning Gothic structures than any other such enclave in Europe...
...structure, and no building displays this more piercingly than the 14th century church of Santa Maria del Mar, the "workers' church" of Barcelona, with its sublimely plain interior, a solemn Sequoia grove of stone hewed from the quarries of Montjuic, the mountain that guards the port...