Word: grass
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...country from the end of World War II until independence in 1951. Once one of the poorest of Arab lands, Libya has become one of the wealthiest since vast reserves of oil were discovered a decade ago. In 1960, Libya's exports consisted of such commodities as esparto grass, olive oil, sponges and camels, and amounted to a paltry $8,500,000. Last year the figure rose to more than $1 billion, 99% of it from oil. Libya now pumps more than 3,000,000 barrels of oil a day, and before long it is expected to overtake Iran...
...novels, particularly The Tin Drum and Dog Years. Grass has also sought to prod Germans out of their complacency about the nation's Nazi past and materialistic present. Still, Grass downgrades his role as a social or political critic. "The idea that writers are the conscience of the nation is pure nonsense," he says. Others disagree. Professor Wilhelm Johannes Schwarz of Quebec's Laval University, who has written a literary critique of Grass, calls the novelist "the direct descendant of Walther von der Vogelweide," a poet who in the 13th century stumped the German dukedoms in support...
Left and Right. Grass travels in a green-and-white Volkswagen bus decorated with a Social Democratic rooster crowing "Es-Pe-De." He usually heads for an area in which the SPD either won narrowly or, in losing, drew at least 20% of the vote. Bundestag seats are figured on winning local votes and also on the basis of party percentage of the total vote; Grass's aim is to increase the Socialist national percentage and thereby secure more seats for the party...
...crowds that Grass draws include both old people in Lederhosen and shawls and young people in beards and sandals. There are usually hecklers from either the far left or the far right. The New Left calls Grass a "liberal crap-head" and a "traitor to socialism." The right-wing National Democratic Party derides Grass as a "porno," because his works are peppered with four-letter words. Grass treats extremists from both sides with contempt, reminding audiences that "socialism when coupled with anarchism leads to fascism...
...southern Sudan, the long-awaited rains have left the countryside carpeted in a lush green. The valley of the rain-swollen Upper Nile is alive with gazelles, dik-dik and brightly plumaged birds, and the elephant grass is five feet high. Over the past several years, that luxuriant growth often concealed guerrilla fighters of the dread Any a Nya (Scorpion) independence movement, but now there are signs that one of the most long-lived conflicts in Africa has begun to ebb. Last week, TIME Correspondent William Smith visited the Sudan and filed a report on a hopeful lull...