Nicaragua's Canal: A Man, A Plan, But Little Else

NOT since the civil war of the 1980s have so many helicopters been clattering over remote parts of Nicaragua. But now the guys squinting down through the tree canopy are in suits: lawyers and business consultants from the United States, Australian engineers, British environmental auditors, even Chinese executives. Their per diemsare being paid by Wang Jing, a Chinese businessman whose $40 billion quest is to build a canal from Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast to its Pacific one.