Word: waterways
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Texas last week, Ronald Reagan thundered about the canal: "We bought it. We paid for it. We built it. And we are going to keep it." As President, Reagan vowed, he would say just that to any "tinhorn dictator" in Panama who sought to gain control over the waterway. The Reagan theatrics, designed to win him support in his dead-even showdown with Gerald Ford in the Texas primary on May 1, drew strong applause...
...official U.S. view is that there is no reason, military or economic, not to return the 51-mile-long canal. Neither supertankers nor the biggest U.S. aircraft carriers can squeeze through it. Yielding the waterway, moreover, would remove a major irritant in U.S. relations with Latin Americans, who have long resented the second-class status of Panamanians in the zone. But in return for giving up the canal and increasing payments to the Panamanian government for its use, the U.S. wants operating control at least until the beginning of the 21st century...
While studying aerial photographs of the Nile Delta after their country's 1967 conquest of the Sinai, Israeli geologists noticed soil markings that were clearly vestiges of two dried-up waterways. One was quickly identified as a silted offshoot of the Nile River called the Pelusiac branch (after the ancient city of Pelusium at its mouth). The nature of the other waterway baffled the geologists until they visited the area and found man-made embankments. With that, they realized that these old mounds marked the route of a remarkable ancient canal that predated the Suez Canal by as many...
...near the town of Qantara, and approached Lake Timsah near Ismailia, where old canal remnants have previously been found. Though wind, sand and irrigation works have wiped out much of the canal's course, Geologists Amihai Sneh, Tuvia Weissbrod and Itamar Perath hint at an intriguing possibility: the waterway may have split in two, one branch following a great east-west depression called Wadi Tumilat to link with the Nile, the other continuing south into the Red Sea along a route that became part of a canal system later built by the Persian conqueror Darius...
...waterway probably ranged in depth from 7 ft. to 10 ft., adequate for ancient barges, but the embankments were 200 ft. apart, much wider than necessary for the water traffic of that day. The Israeli scientists think they know why. Writing in American Scientist, they point out that a wide channel would have made it an effective barrier against invaders from the east, a constant threat to ancient Egypt. In addition, it would have provided essential irrigation water. Could the ancient Egyptians have built such a great canal? Yes, say the geologists. After all, hundreds of years earlier the Egyptians...