Word: straits
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...Strait of Messina, a turbulent, six-mile-wide ribbon of water that separates Sicily from the toe of Italy, has never been a popular place for water sports. It was the home of Scylla and Charybdis, the mythological monsters that wrecked ships and snatched unsuspecting seamen from their decks. And if sailors beware, swimmers positively shun the place. Only the very rash-or the very bold-venture into its treacherous currents...
...going was tougher now; her right arm developed a cramp; she swallowed sea water and vomited. Only her legs kept her going. At last, after 5 hrs. and 22 min. in the water, Mary Revell staggered ashore at Grotta, Sicily-the first person ever to swim the Messina Strait both ways. She blew a kiss to the cheering crowd on the beach, then collapsed...
...adventures. Daddy did not offer, and Mary did not ask. To her rescue came the National Tea Council (she drinks tea during her swims), the Detroit chapter of the National Society of Non-Smokers (she does not smoke) and the National Swimming Pool Institute. When Mary swam the Strait of Gibraltar last June, solicitous Spanish smugglers provided boats and guides. In July, a Turkish newspaper persuaded her to visit Turkey. She shocked the staid Turks by wandering around in Bermuda shorts, but within a month she made herself a national heroine by swimming the Bosporus (both crosswise and lengthwise...
Parleys on the Green. With his young nation booming, Abdul Rahman looked with increasing fear at the predicament of neighboring Singapore, just three-quarters of a mile across the Johore Strait. There Communism was spreading like an infection among the underfed, underemployed masses in Singapore's squalid, teeming tenement quarters. By strikes, riots and boycotts, the Peking-oriented Communist-front Barisan Socialist Party tried to topple the tottering government glued together by Singapore's shifty, brilliant, Cambridge-educated Prime Minister Lee Kuan...
From Tokyo to Tennessee, from the Baltic to the Bosporus, a killer winter raged across many parts of the world last week. Blizzards and savage winds took 300 lives in Europe, and another 150 in the U.S. A slashing gale capsized a ferry in the Korea Strait, causing 137 deaths, and an avalanche in the mountains of north central Japan entombed 19 persons. The thermometer was playing tricks. While Moscow's temperature was 11°, the mercury plummeted to fantastic depths in a broad swath across the U.S.: -19° in Cleveland, -30° in parts of Kentucky...