Word: straits
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...want to be remembered? I've been a person who sticks to his ideals and to righteousness. I hope my tombstone says: ONE WHO SACRIFICED. I sacrificed my life for the people, for Taiwan, for democracy, human rights, and to protect peace across the Taiwan Strait. Today, textbooks say I was the soul of the opposition movement [during the authoritarian era]. How they see me in the future, that's up to them ... [But] I don't want to be President...
What's going on? The two orders offered tantalizing clues. There are only a few places in the world where minesweepers top the list of U.S. naval requirements. And every sailor, petroleum engineer and hedge-fund manager knows the name of the most important: the Strait of Hormuz, the 20-mile-wide bottleneck in the Persian Gulf through which roughly 40% of the world's oil needs to pass each day. Coupled with the CNO's request for a blockade review, a deployment of minesweepers to the west coast of Iran would seem to suggest that a much discussed...
Next, there is oil. The Persian Gulf, a traffic jam on good days, would become a parking lot. Iran could plant mines and launch dozens of armed boats into the bottleneck, choking off the shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz and causing a massive disruption of oil-tanker traffic. A low-key Iranian mining operation in 1987 forced the U.S. to reflag Kuwaiti oil tankers and escort them, in slow-moving files of one and two, up and down the Persian Gulf. A more intense operation would probably send oil prices soaring above $100 per bbl.--which may explain...
...Plata, one of Spain's few remaining traditional tuna-trapping companies. To combat the tuna ranches, Sevilla and other trappers need to halt their prey long before it reaches the Mediterranean's open water. From late May, shoals of tuna begin their annual migration from the Atlantic through the Strait of Gibraltar, before spending one month breeding in the Med's temperate water. The traditional fishermen's contest against the industrial ranches has become so fierce during the past few years that some marine biologists and environmental activists fear it could threaten the very survival of the Mediterranean bluefin...
...look on the walls of the administrative offices, to be photographed. Plans are afoot to capture more of the tourist dollar, through art and guided tours of Gooniyandi country. "The demise of trad-itional communities is due to structures, such as the [defunct] Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Comm-ission, that have been imposed from afar by governments," says school principal Len Boyle. "It's far better now that the money, and responsibility, is in the hands of local comm-unities." Independently run by an Aboriginal community board, the school draws on funding from Perth, Canberra and philanthropists. Indeed, filing...