Word: levante
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Lebanon (pop. 1,425,000). Smallest Arab country, officially half Christian and half Moslem, the cultural and commercial center of the Arab Levant. Pro-U.S., and less hostile to Israel than any other neighboring state, Lebanon alone among the Arabs has so far refused to break diplomatic relations with Britain or France...
Dyspeptic Pianist Oscar Levant and his local TV show (Words About Music) were scuttled by Los Angeles' station KCOP after Levant began neglecting music to make off-color comments on such interesting compositions as Marilyn Monroe and Richard Nixon. Moaned his ex-sponsor: "The show got too dirty. We want to sell carpets, not controversies." Confessed Wit Levant: "I was outraged at my taste . . . I'm like a middle-class James Joyce-extremely-self-conscious. The station left it up to my own judgment, which I don't have...
...Communist, mercurial, spaniel-eyed Marshall is no Briton either. Of Spanish origin, his family migrated from the Levant to Singapore, where his father Anglicized the Hebrew family name, Mashal (meaning parable). Born in 1908, young Marshall went to Singapore's St. David's School, suffered malaria and tuberculosis, sold automobiles, went to London to study law, and set up as a barrister in Singapore. A member of the Singapore Volunteer Force in World War II, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1942; his fellow prisoners remember his determined cheeriness in a Hokkaido camp in which...
Whatever the Kremlin's motives, its pronouncement had lightning results in the Levant. "The end of an illusion," wailed a Beirut newspaper. "Arabs can no longer play East and West against each other." In Cairo the newspaper Al Ahram denounced the Russians for "meddling in the Middle East." "Iniquitous," cried Syria's Defense Minister. "The U.S.S.R. lumps aggressors with victims." And in Israel old David Ben-Gurion, sniffing the air, shed his khaki battle dress and turned up at work wearing a nonbelligerent white shirt instead...
...York export house for 100 four-wheel-drive jeeps (which cannot legally be exported to Iron Curtain countries). The jeeps' purported destination was Beirut, where a merchant named Jean Maghamez supposedly wanted them for local farmers. Willys-Overland Export Corp. of Toledo cabled its Syrian dealer, Levant Motors, to investigate the $150,000 order. Levant Motors discovered that Consignee Ma-ghamez was just a front man, and replied that it suspected Les Fils de Basile Obegi was planning to reexport the jeeps to Rumania. The auto firm, however, said nothing to the Commerce Department...