Word: waterways
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...slowly setting behind me as my campaign paddle wheeler, the Mark Twain, steams into port in Hannibal, Missouri - the final stop on a nearly 400-mile trek down the Mississippi River. As you know from your own trip down this great waterway (captured in a recent special issue of TIME magazine), life on the Mississippi is nothing short of spectacular...
Nature loves the rhythm of a meandering river, with the summertime droughts and spring floods that nurture wildlife and push a waterway down a new path. Commercial barges, however, demand constancy, in the form of a canal filled with enough water to keep their 9-ft.-deep hulls from running aground. So after the great 1927 flood, the Army Corps of Engineers began shackling the unruly current. The corps built levees along the river's banks to hold in the water and turned its rapids and ever changing sandbars into a more civilized staircase of 29 locks and dams stretching...
...America's ability to project its power abroad, and conservative Republicans have questioned the wisdom of giving it up. Some Republican legislators - and Pat Buchanan - have even used the fact that Hong Kong-based port company Hutchison Whampoa will manage the facility for Panama to suggest that the strategic waterway may fall under Chinese control in the event of a crisis. Even though that scenario is dismissed as far-fetched by Panamanians and most U.S. analysts, the White House is clearly taking no chances with Al Gore's election year looming. Indeed, Clinton appears to be more willing to sacrifice...
...peculiar: a new President is about to be sworn in amid charges that the government has switched control of the canal to a company allegedly controlled by the Chinese People's Liberation Army. The catfight over that is just a preview. The canal handover--the U.S. will pass the waterway over to Panama at noon on Dec. 31--is unleashing political separation anxiety in the U.S. and everything from panic to greed in Panama. Le Carre must be amused...
With only four months left until U.S. envoys hand over the keys to the waterway, the alarmists may have delayed too long to scupper the deal. The treaty allows the U.S. to intervene militarily--but only if the canal's neutrality is menaced. While critics now include presidential candidates Gary Bauer, Pat Buchanan and John McCain, it is hard to imagine the U.S. backing...