Word: coptic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Coptic Orthodox Church of Ethiopia, which still observes a peculiar 13-month calendar all its own, celebrates the feast of Christmas this week. The country could hardly have less to make merry about. Eleven months after the "creeping coup" that resulted in Emperor Haile Selassie's overthrow and imprisonment last September, Ethiopia remains one of the poorest and least literate nations on earth. The average annual income is a pitiful $80, and fewer than 3% of the 26 million Ethiopians can read or write. In the beginning, the 120-man Provisional Military Administrative Council that now rules the country...
...chosen by the Parliament, as will judges and Cabinet members. The Emperor's Imperial Court will be replaced by an independent judiciary and Supreme Court, whose Chief Justice will be elected for life by the Parliament. The Emperor will also lose his position as head of the Coptic Christian Church, an institution whose political influence has been second only to the monarchy itself, and there will be a complete separation of church and state...
Widespread arrests of Selassie's former aides have left the Emperor friendless as well as powerless. His official function reduced to ritual approval of the military's reforms, Ethiopia's "King of Kings" has little to do but attend daily services of the Coptic Church, visit his aging pride of lions in cages on the palace grounds, and walk his pet Chihuahua...
...minimum wage to at least 75?, make primary schooling free and give government employees the right to organize, did most workers return to their jobs. Teachers, however, remained out, demanding higher salaries. Toward week's end their protests were joined by several hundred black-robed priests of the Coptic Christian Church, who demonstrated outside Parliament. Claiming to speak for Ethiopia's 200,000 priests, they threatened to strike unless they received a boost in their current $1.50 monthly minimum allowance. Also angry were the capital's estimated 50,000 prostitutes. In leaflets, addressed to the police...
...Canal, Cairenes are patient and polite. "All we want is to have our own land back, and then everybody can live in peace," says one woman. "Tell the Americans that we want to make peace and finish with all this war," says the custodian of a cemetery in the Coptic quarter of old Cairo...