Word: straits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...past four years, Taipei has promoted informal ties with Beijing, permitting its citizens to visit the mainland and sanctioning indirect trade across the Taiwan Strait. But, the Nationalists warn, their latest peace offering must be answered in kind by Beijing before tensions ease any further...
...Black-market deals, particularly for pelts, can be conducted only through a series of middlemen. Each person provides an introduction to the next link in the human chain, then extracts a fee for the service. Ultimately the Taiwanese meet the Chinese on the muddy, gray waters of the Taiwan Strait. Often the pelts, along with Chinese antiques and traditional medicines, are traded by fishermen for Taiwanese electronics and consumer goods. The practice is so universal that when members of the Taiwan Coast Guard were asked by the WWF agent to estimate how many fisherman were engaged in smuggling, they laughed...
...refugees began turning up in southern Italy's fishing villages aboard commandeered vessels ranging from tugboats to freighters. In the space of six days last week, 20,000 Albanians fled worsening shortages of food and other essentials in their impoverished homeland and sought asylum across the Adriatic's Strait of Otranto. Startled local authorities in Italy did their | best to provide temporary accommodations in schools and army barracks, but thousands of the Albanians were soon forced to camp out on town docks, wrapping themselves in plastic sheets for warmth...
...GULF. Because it is virtually an enclosed basin, with an outlet to the sea only 35 miles wide at the Strait of Hormuz, the gulf is especially vulnerable to oil spills. In a body of water badly contaminated by tankers, garbage and sewage, a disastrous spill of the kind that Iraq caused last week could destroy nesting areas for endangered sea turtles and spawning grounds for shrimp while poisoning tuna, snapper, sardines and anchovies, which are vital to local fishermen. "The ecosystems are endangered anyway," says Frank Barnaby, former director of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute. "Another million barrels...
Most of the conflicts, in one way or another, grow out of a commitment to the land. Despite anthropologists' evidence that they came to this country across the Bering Strait land bridge, many tribes believe their ancestors emerged from an underworld through a hole in the earth known as the sipapu. Their religion, their art and their well-being are tied to the land they have guarded and revered. Now, many generations after white settlers bribed, swindled and threatened thousands of Native Americans out of millions of acres, they are determined to seek restitution...