Word: benghazi
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Encroaching Desert. Smart shops in Tripoli and Benghazi-the twin capitals-display Dior dresses, footwear from Italy and tape recorders from Japan. Auto agencies do a brisk business, and visitors are warned to watch both ways for "first-generation drivers" -registrations have risen from 12,000 to 55,000 in five years-as well as for gaping chuckholes in the streets, beneath which Tripoli is installing its first modern sewer system. New hotels and apartment houses are sprouting like desert flowers; three new hotels worth $10 million will soon be started in Tripoli alone. A small upper-middle class...
...labor to meet the demands of oil companies and the booming construction industry, not enough competent administrators to channel oil revenues into properly planned projects, not enough trained government officials willing to make decisions. Rents and prices have more than doubled in five years. On the outskirts of Tripoli, Benghazi and Tobruk have grown up squalid Bidonvilles where thousands of Bedouins, attracted from the desert by the lure of the city, live in houses made of shipping crates and lift vans, vainly waiting for wealth to come to them. Meanwhile, the desert is slowly but inexorably encroaching on agricultural land...
...Americans, the source of pain was all too familiar: a 297-page report by a parliamentary committee investigating overseas military spending. Sweeping the bases, the committee found Benghazi about to be closed, Hong Kong indefensible, Gibraltar all but useless, Singapore disorganized, Malaysia too powerful, and the new Indian Ocean airbase at Gan dismayingly expensive ("The contract estimate has been revised on five occasions"). At all these bases, charged the committee, the armed forces have squandered the taxpayers' money on illusory projects. At Hong Kong, the army "surrendered" valuable land to the local government, which not long ago sold...
...Force rushed paramedics and tents from Wheelus airbase at Tripoli, and the British ferried in doctors and nurses from their base at nearby Benghazi. At week's end more than 200 bodies had been recovered and an estimated 300-500 still lay buried in the ruins...
...scholarly, fine-boned Arab of 62, who wears the blue robes of a Bedouin monarch and speaks in a high, thin voice, King Idris I led his Senussi tribesmen in two wars against the Italians, now uses a converted Italian barracks near Benghazi as his palace. He trusts the West, and privately refers to the seven-nation Arab League as "an alliance of weaknesses." But recognizing Libya's kinship with the rest of the Moslem world, he plans to join the Arab League. "If anybody ever succeeds in cementing this country together," says an English veteran of Libya...