Word: mauritania
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...autumn chill has penetrated the walls and filled my room, so i must wear a jacket as I type, My sister is so faraway, on the other side of the world, that I imagine is afternoon there right now, I'm not sure what season it is in Mauritania, but I don't think that matters: it is always very hot. So while I am fighting off sleep and bundling against the cold, she is probably aching and sweating in temperatures of well over 100 degrees...
...high school Alison was a champion figure skater. In Mauritania there is no ice. In fact, there is very little but sand, She was told by the people who assigned her to that country that 70 percent of Mauritania bound volunteers quit in their first year. The natives are starving, disease runs rampant, and water is searce. Foliage in Mauritania is gradually disappearing under sand dunes, which are creeping across the country at a rate of several thousand feof each year. It seems strange to me that our own New England sun, which turns the fall sky ice blue, sparkles...
...when Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco lay on his deathbed, Hassan led 300,000 of his unarmed subjects on a March across the border into the Spanish Sahara. The ploy worked. Spain withdrew from the colony immediately, I leaving the northern two-thirds to Morocco and the southern third to Mauritania. Nobody asked the inhabitants, believed to number about 100,000, what they wanted for their country. As it turned out, many of them wanted independence and, toward that end, banded together in a guerrilla fighting force...
...warfare continued, Mauritania renounced its claim to any part of the former Spanish colony. Hassan held on, but understood that he was in a bind: he could not defeat the Polisario, even though he was spending about $ 1 million a day in trying; and he could not withdraw because his countrymen of every political persuasion, whatever they might think of his other policies, were wildly enthusiastic about the war in the Sahara...
...protest. (TIME had also learned about the alleged plot, but concluded that the report was untrue.) The White House last week flatly denied Newsweek's story. But then, in another deceptive leak, apparently designed to stop the Libya rumor, CIA sources suggested that the West African nation of Mauritania was the object of a somewhat similar-sounding operation. In fact, both congressional committees had objected to a much broader, proposed CIA operation-one that did not involve physical attacks on any national leader-to shore up U.S. interests in the Middle East and North Africa. This hasty scheme reinforced...