Word: ben
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...much of last week, France's reputation abroad and the fate of its government at home rested in the shaky hands of a hesitant old man-Morocco's Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa. All week long, Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay telephoned anxiously from Manhattan, in hopes of favorable news to influence the U.N. Assembly vote on the Algerian situation. From Paris, Premier Edgar Faure telephoned urgently to Morocco's Resident General Boyer de Latour; unless Ben Moulay Arafa had "voluntarily" departed before the National Assembly met this week, the Faure government was doomed...
...midweek, De Latour had worked out a compromise with the leaders of the Présence Française: Ben Moulay Arafa would leave, but turn over the royal seal, symbol of the Sultan's authority, not to the Regency Council but to a member of his own family. The old Sultan seemed ready to agree, but then balked. His chief adviser, Vizier Si Hadj Abder Raman el Hajou, had talked him into refusing any compromise at all. De Latour acted. At 4 one morning, police arrived at El Hajou's apartment in downtown...
...lips quivered as Resident General de Latour pronounced the incantatory words of political exorcism over his head: a letter from President René Coty praising "the high nobility of the sentiments which once again guide Your Majesty in the serious decision you have been pleased to take." Ben Moulay Arafa scarcely listened, laboriously climbed aboard the waiting plane. An hour later, the plane landed at Tangier, where Ben Moulay Arafa will live at French expense in a hastily rehabilitated villa which once belonged to another throneless Sultan of Morocco...
...ostensible snag was merely the selection of a third "neutral" member of the three-man regency council. Faure picked Brigadier General Si Kettani ben Hamou. Kettani declined to accept until he consulted Juin and Brigadier General Jean Lecomte, Koenig's chief of staff, and an old North African friend of Juin's. Lecomte told General Kettani to refuse Faure's appointment...
Israel struck oil last week, right on the fringe of the Negeb desert and only six miles from the Gaza strip. Rushing to the spot from Tel Aviv, Premier Designate David Ben-Gurion clambered down into a pit and dug to watch the first flow of the stuff. "Mazel Tov [Congratulations]," he murmured to the drillers. "When can we start to use the stuff?" Development Minister Dov Joseph hurried off by car to the Weizmann Institute of Science 25 miles away with a pop-bottleful to be assayed...