Duel Over Shipping Lanes -- U.S. Pullback Leaves China, India in Tense Battle for Supremacy

Summary

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HAMBANTOTA, Sri Lanka - This battered harbor town on Sri Lanka's southern tip, with its scrawny men selling even scrawnier fish, seems an unlikely focus for an emerging international competition over energy supply routes that fuel much of the global economy.

An impoverished place still recovering from the devastation of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Hambantota has a desolate air, a sense of nowhereness, punctuated by the realization that looking south over the expanse of ocean, the next landfall is Antarctica.

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Duel Over Shipping Lanes -- U.S. Pullback Leaves China, India in Tense Battle for Supremacy

But just over the horizon runs one of the world's great trade arteries, the shipping lanes in which thousands of vessels carry oil from the Middle East and raw materials to Asia, returning with television ...

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