Word: canallers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some Middle East observers suggest that Sadat badly needs a lift right now. He has just about exhausted the political popularity that he accumulated in the October war and as a result of the disengagement negotiations that put Egyptian troops back on the east bank of the canal last year. There are considerable signs of unrest in Egypt. Workers rioted briefly in January and again in March to protest rising prices and food shortages, and students also demonstrated...
...terminus of the great waterway, workers swarmed over docks and piers that had been empty for years. Buoys were being assembled, and pilot ships recaulked and overhauled. In the freshly painted warehouses, piles of new, sweet-smelling hemp rope rose like giant becalmed cobras in spirals to the ceilings. Canal pilots, the skilled men who guide ships through the narrow canal, were flocking back from all over the world. The Suez Canal, once the vital link between the West and the East, was being prepared for this week's gala reopening, eight years to the day after its closing...
Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the 101-mile-long canal has been little more than a fortified ditch. The Israeli pullback into the Sinai in the aftermath of the October 1973 war still leaves it open to easy attack. But with both banks now under Egyptian control. President Anwar Sadat gambled that he could open it again. To underscore his seriousness, Sadat also approved a $10 billion five-year plan to rebuild the ruined cities along the canal's banks and construct new airports, rail lines and communications facilities in the area...
...task of readying the canal kept an international team busy for more than a year removing the detritus of two full-scale wars and a war of attrition. As the first step, U.S. Navy Sea Stallion helicopters towed minesweeping sleds the entire length of the waterway, searching for magnetic sea mines. The Israelis refused to say whether or not they had planted any, but none were found. Next, teams from the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, France and Egypt cleared out land mines, bombs, antitank mines, cluster bombs and anything else that might have accidentally fallen into the water...
...money may prove to be well spent. A 19th century biographer of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat who completed the canal in 1869, said that the waterway "traced for civilization a pacific and productive route across the sands of the desert." It also saved mercantile countries huge sums in shipping charges. Closing the canal has cost an estimated $10 billion in the extra expense of sending goods around Africa's southern tip. By the end of this week, when the first convoy starts north from Suez city, ships traveling from the Persian Gulf will be able...