Some of the police appear to have sided with militia, which set up road blocks, raided police armouries and took over a heavily-armed police gunboat.
We are returning to the standards of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy, ignoring all the lessons experienced so dearly since then.JIM INGRAMPeterhead, AberdeenshireSIR Your leader on the Iraq bombings blandly states that Richard Butler's report is unsatisfactory.
A president who spent the Vietnam war in the Texas Air National Guard, presumably defending the Lone Star State from possible bombing by Oklahoma, can hardly impugn the patriotism of a gunboat officer.
A gunboat chuffs up a river and fires a few shots.
The remains of the Mary Rose, a Tudor gunboat built in Portsmouth, will be one of the few reminders of the city's contribution to naval shipbuilding after BAE Systems, a defence firm, announced the closure of its dockyard as part of a plan to shed 1,775 jobs.
A gunboat and later two transporters, complete with a party of marines, sailed up to a giant monastic house.
As the centre of global gravity shifted to the Atlantic, the Pacific became a vast backwater of trading monopolies brutally enforced by gunboat.
Waterborne traffic between Yunnan and Thailand is expected to resume soon, with armed Chinese guards.To some neighbours, armed Chinese patrols taking on river pirates and insurgents (much of the drug business is linked to border insurgencies in Myanmar) conjures up images of gunboat diplomacy.
The fourth kind of empire, suggests Mr Darwin, was a more informal one in places such as Argentina and Egypt where British influence was exercised through commerce, investment and shrewd diplomacy (occasionally of the gunboat kind).What characterised Britain's empire most was the matchless adaptability of its builders and promoters.
China may well have three small carriers within five to ten years, though military analysts think it would take much longer for the Chinese to learn how to use them well.A new gunboat diplomacyThis promises to be a formidable array of assets.
At the same time, they were firm in rejecting Turkey's attempt to reinvent what one can only describe as "gunboat diplomacy".Furthermore, my government, time and again, has pledged that the discovery of new energy sources would be for the shared benefit of all Cypriots.
