Word: strait
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...herded into Middle Eastern and West African airports and onto planes to Malaysia, where they are hidden away in safe houses for a week or two. They are loaded at night onto buses, taken to deserted stretches of coastline and then ferried by small fishing boats across the narrow Strait of Malacca into Indonesia. Then there is the wait, sometimes for months, for another boat for the final?often deadly?attempt to make it to Australia...
...nation of Indonesia, which itself is composed of 13,000 islands straddling the equator, in roughly the same time zone as Hong Kong and Vietnam. Bali is about the size of Delaware, with a population of 3 million exuberant Hindus. To the west of Bali, separated by a strait of just several hundred yards, is the island of Java, which is about the size of California, with a population of 100 million Muslims. Stretching east is an archipelago with hundreds of small to medium-sized islands, islands with names like Sumba, Sumbawa, Lombok, Flores, Komodo, the legendary Spice Islands, Timor...
Business and political leaders in the U.S., Canada and Russia are mulling a plan to build a railroad tunnel beneath the Bering Strait. A rail link, they say, could carry 30 billion tons of cargo a year and cut shipping time from Los Angeles to Vladivostok as much as two weeks. It's an attainable feat: the strait is only 60 miles wide at its narrowest point (twice as wide as the English Channel Tunnel, which took seven years and $15 billion to construct). But to make the Bering tunnel accessible on the North American side, connecting lines would have...
...Very Big Hostage Not Through Our Strait, You're Not! The mighty varyag, an aircraft carrier once intended to be the pride of the Soviet fleet, is 300 m long, displaces 67,500 tons of water and is stuck. For 13 months, the decommissioned behemoth has been marooned in the Black Sea waiting to be towed to Macau, where it's slated to become a floating casino. Turkey won't let it go?ostensibly because it could sideswipe houses along the Bosphorus Strait, even though the waterway is 700 m wide at its narrowest. Politics is the more likely culprit...
...waits for his next sortie, he tells the story of his last raid in February. A crew member on a Thai palm-oil tanker gave him the layout of the ship and an exact time and place to meet in the Malacca Strait. The captain contacted the boss of a Hong Kong triad who agreed to pay the captain and his crew $9,000 upfront and another $50,000 on delivery. The triad also hired a crew of bajing loncat and arranged fake papers for the ship under a new name. On the agreed night, two speedboats raced west...