Word: beirutization
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Nature completed what man began in Beirut last week. A khamsin, the seasonal wind from the desert, blew clouds of choking yellow dust into the tortured city, and between them, the storm and new political maneuvers brought an end to renewed fighting between leftists and rightists. Before the battles tapered off and an "armed truce" was reinstated, however, some 200 people had been killed in a single day in wild artillery and mortar duels. In one more senseless scene from a year long tragedy, three mortar rounds fell on a crowd of women shoppers and their children in West Beirut...
...troubled neighbor. At least 3,000 Syrian troops were reported in Lebanon, along with 7,000 fighters of the Damascus-controlled Saiqa fedayeen movement. Syrian tanks and antiaircraft "flak tracks" dug in three miles across the border, and armored cars probed as far as the Lebanon mountains overlooking Beirut. Curiously, it is Lebanon's Christians-not the Moslems-who welcome the Syrian incursion; they believe that the Syrians will forge a peaceful settlement...
...business?" Virtually every multinational corporation has closed its regional offices in Beirut, packed its records and fled...
Surprisingly, the largest number have resettled in a city that is neither Moslem nor even in the Middle East -Athens. Some 70 major U.S. companies have moved their regional headquarters there from Beirut, among them National Cash Register, Caterpillar, Boeing, Control Data, Exxon, Goodyear, Union Carbide, Chase Manhattan Bank and Morgan Guaranty Trust...
Athens, on the other hand, has everything. "The bouzouki music, the food," says an Arab. "You might almost say the Greeks are Arabs wearing pants." Even Athens' shops and hotels can compare with Beirut's. Airline, telephone and telex service is excellent, and there is still a sufficient amount of modern office space. True, prices are high; the rent for much desired villas with swimming pools in suburban Kifissia has doubled recently, to about $1,000 a month. Even so, points out one recent corporate settler, Edwin P. Hoffman, senior vice president of Citibank, "Athens has the schools...