Word: toehold
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...century British pirate Henry Morgan. The attackers were part of the 4,000-member Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (A.R.D.E.), whose leader is Eden Pastora Gomez, a famed defector from the ranks of Nicaragua's Sandinista government. A.R.D.E.'S objective in seizing the settlement was twofold: to secure a toehold on the jungle fringes of Nicaraguan territory as the first step toward winning international recognition as a contra provisional government, and to win a port of entry for military supply...
...days before the offensive began, the Argentine air force had done its determined best to keep the British penned up in their expanding bridgehead. As the Port San Carlos landing area grew from a toehold on a rocky shore into a substantial area, Argentine pilots flew sortie after sortie against the warships and supply vessels that moved through narrow Falkland Sound, and the results at times were devastating for Britain's warships. As they have all along, the claims from London and Buenos Aires varied greatly about the course of the spectacular war of attrition offshore. Britain reported the loss...
Japanese merchants have had a toehold on the U.S. gram trade since the 1950s, when they first set up export offices in West Coast port cities like San Francisco and Seattle to buy foodstuffs for Japan. The island nation of 116 million people is a principal grain importer and now buys some $6 billion a year from the U.S., its biggest supplier. In 1973, after a grain shortage squeezed the worldwide market for soybeans, a major Japanese grain import from the U.S., the anxious Japanese traders began moving inland to buy directly from farmers in an effort to secure...
...last year he made a deal with Burma's Communist Party to provide its cadres with rice in return for opium. The Communists soon became a major supplier. Khun Sa's army in turn acted as a conduit that enabled Communists to establish a toehold near the Thai border...
Though information gathered at the polar station is scientifically valuable and could even help doctors select and prepare the best possible crews for long space journeys, the reason for the American presence at the pole is as much geopolitical as geophysical. It gives the U.S. a unique toehold in all the Antarctic claims except the Norwegian, which stops short of the pole proper. Says Bernhard Lettau, polar oceanography manager for the National Science Foundation, which runs the U.S.'s $67.4 million-a-year Antarctic scientific effort: "The pole is highly symbolic. By being here we maintain our status...