Word: khamsin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nature completed what man began in Beirut last week. A khamsin, the seasonal wind from the desert, blew clouds of choking yellow dust into the tortured city, and between them, the storm and new political maneuvers brought an end to renewed fighting between leftists and rightists. Before the battles tapered off and an "armed truce" was reinstated, however, some 200 people had been killed in a single day in wild artillery and mortar duels. In one more senseless scene from a year long tragedy, three mortar rounds fell on a crowd of women shoppers and their children in West Beirut...
...shaky cease-fire shifted attention back to Lebanon's complicated political situation, which was about as impenetrable as the khamsin. Parliament in a hasty session had ratified a constitutional amendment authorizing early election of a new President to succeed Suleiman Franjieh, and the stubborn Maronite Christian Chief Executive finally agreed to step down. His successor must be one on whom all factions can agree, and one, moreover, acceptable to neighboring Syria. That might boost the chances of Elias Sarkis, quiet governor of Lebanon's central bank, while dampening those of Centrist Raymond Eddé, an outspokenly antiright wing...
...festivities, watched by curious Arabs, could not mask the grim mood of Jerusalem and Israel. The city and the nation are gripped by a cold fury, reported TIME Correspondent Marsh Clark: "It is an icy resolve that has stilled the passing joke. Like the coming of the khamsin, the cruel desert wind that afflicts the spirit of all those in its path, the Arab attack has plunged Israel into a state of shock. The myth of Israeli invincibility and Arab ineptitude has been demolished at one stroke...
Best of all, Hone provides a portrait of Nasser's Cairo that occasionally reads like updated Lawrence Durrell -a city of dusty cricket fields and sweet coffee and the khamsin rustling the jacaranda trees, a city in which the revolutionary press censor plays badminton on the roof of his apartment house and keeps a suffragi downstairs to retrieve the stray shuttlecocks from the streets below.-Otto Friedrich
...atmosphere produced by the khamsin contains an excess of positive ions. Young people, whose metabolic rates tend to be high, react to such atmospheric conditions by absorbing positive electrical energy like a storage battery, until they literally become overcharged. Their hair becomes electrified and stands on end, and they develop migraine headaches and nausea. They become tense, irritable and occasionally violent. They also secrete large amounts of serotonin, a hormone associated with the nervous system...