Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...former Italian colony was, and for the most part still is, a vast desert, more than three times the size of France but inhabited by fewer than 2,000,000 people. Their chief exports consisted of camels, dates and scrap metal from the battle wreckage of World War II. Their per capita income: $50 a year. But underneath the desert, undiscovered until the late 1950s, lay the oil that would fuel Gaddafi's ambitions for Libya...
...carry out the duties of six top jobs, Gaddafi works up to 20 hours a day. Occasionally he disappears for days at a time-to meditate in the desert, his friends say. When he addresses his people, he sometimes speaks for four or five hours at a stretch, his voice bursting with urgency. "Don't believe anything I don't tell you; I will tell you everything; we should have faith together!" he may cry. The crowd replies: "With our spirit, our blood, our religion, we will fight at your side, O Gaddafi...
...never seen Tripoli port as crammed as it is today. Modest but modern housing is going up everywhere. Yet, on the 20-minute drive into town from the airport, the brand-new divided highway goes by acre after acre of makeshift shacks perched precariously on the windswept desert. But the new stress is on agriculture. Gaddafi the Bedouin, brought up to revere trees as a source of food and shade, has ordered a massive land-reclamation program to make 700,000 acres of desert arable. (Cost: $800 million.) His aim is to make Libya self-sufficient in food...
...shadow of Iran's Zagros Mountains stands a forbidding wasteland known as Dasht-i-Lut (Great Sand Desert). There, for thousands of years, howling sandstorms have been shifting the dunes and wearing the rocks into fantastical shapes. Convinced that no civilization could have risen and thrived under these inhospitable conditions, archaeologists long bypassed the area...
...result of several dramatic discoveries in recent years, they are now flocking to the scorched region. In 1967, during some routine surveying near the town of Shahdad at the edge of the great desert, scientists from Teheran University's Geographical Institute stumbled upon several ancient clay vessels. Excited by the find, the Iranian Archaeological Service promptly sent the first of several expeditions into the desert. Digging steadily for six years under the leadership of Dr. Ali Hakemi, former director of Iran Bastan Museum, the archaeologists have uncovered no fewer than 2,000 artifacts. Even more important, the diggers...