Word: straits
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Beijing may have thought it was making a clear diplomatic demarche. But the flip-flopping over the Kitty Hawk made China seem both vindictive and indecisive. It led a lot of observers to wonder what would happen if there was a real crisis in the Taiwan Strait, where there is always the potential for a disastrous "misunderstanding." It also highlighted a lack of communication within the Chinese government that makes the possibility of a military confrontation in the Strait even more worrying...
...Australian courts and government into admitting that the Aborigines owned their land before white arrival--that the doctrine of terra nullius (no- man's-land) was legally invalid. This finally happened in 1992, when Eddie Mabo, a member of the Meriam clan on the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait off northern Australia, successfully argued before the high court that his people had been there before the whites and had never given up their ancient rights of ownership. This was the first "native title" victory in Australian...
...inseparable part of China, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte has called Chen's proposal "a mistake," urging Taiwan's leaders to "behave in a responsible manner." China's Taiwan Affairs Office warned that it has "made necessary preparations to cope with any serious situation" across the strait. Yet the criticism does not seem to have dampened enthusiasm for the referendum. On Sept. 15, more than 100,000 people rallied to support the idea in Taiwan and New York City. And Chen--whose government three days later placed a two-page ad in the New York Times calling...
...Arctic but also their giant neighbor to the south. When Prime Minister Harper declared in August that the "first principle of Arctic sovereignty is use it or lose it," he was directing his message partly at Washington. The U.S. has long claimed that the Northwest Passage is an international strait through which all ships have the right to travel, whether Canadians want them there or not. That line has always rankled Canadians but never more so than now that the ice is disappearing. "I'll jump up and down and say it - the passage is Canadian," says Josh Hunter, Resolute...
...other Arctic nations making their plays, it would be too much to expect the U.S. - an Arctic state itself, thanks to Alaska - to stand idly by. The Coast Guard icebreaker now on its way back from plying the waters of the Chukchi Cap, north of the Bering Strait, has charted the sea floor with a multibeam echo sounder to delineate where Alaska's continental shelf ends and the depths of the Arctic Ocean begin. But to press its case for extended territorial waters, as the other Arctic nations are doing, the U.S. needs to sign the convention. Some conservatives have...