Word: charlies
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...southern Algerian garrison town of Colomb-Béchar one morning last week crept a strange train on an expensive errand. Its locomotive, heavily armored, was preceded by six freight cars loaded with sandbags. Its average speed on its way to Ain-Sefra, another garrison town 170 miles to the northeast, was a hesitant 13 m.p.h. Whenever it reached a bridge, invariably a bridge thrown up temporarily by French Army engineers-it slowed down to a walk...
Slow and unprepossessing as it was, the Colomb-Béchar-Ain-Sefra Express was a valiant symbol of what Frenchmen like to call "the French presence" in Algeria. Conceived by Napoleon III and completed under the supervision of Marshal Louis Lyautey, greatest of France's North African proconsuls, the Colomb-Béchar-Ain-Sefra line is the southernmost portion of a railroad that runs all the way from the Mediterranean port of Oran to the rim of the Sahara...
Nine months ago Algeria's rebels set out to destroy this iron limb of French imperialism. Basing themselves in newly independent Morocco-at some points the Colomb-Béchar line runs within a mile and a half of Moroccan territory -the guerrillas slipped into Algeria by night, laying mines, blowing up bridges and ripping up track. By last week they had blown up all of the line's 116 permanent bridges, destroyed 40 freight cars and six electric engines...
...Coal fields of 100 million tons were found far inland near Colomb-Béchar, are already producing 350,000 tons a year...
...Pauling believes that mental deficiency may be similarly caused by defective molecules. Of all mental char acteristics, intelligence is the one most easily measured and least subject to change. Studies have shown that the children of the intelligent are more likely to be intelligent than those of the unintelligent. Pauling would like to carry this proposition several steps farther. "We believe," he says, "that significant progress can be made in the attack on mental deficiency by ... fundamental research employing the most powerful techniques of modern chemistry ... to understand the causes and workings of certain abnormal molecules...