Word: sahara
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...souvenirs de voyage -in some cases, of an imaginary Africa-in the form of tents. The tents are not habitable. One, entitled Sudan, has no entrance; the gloomy space inside is occupied by a stuffed toucan on a perch, eerie blue in the half-light. The accessible space in Sahara, for all the breadth of the piece, is a small womblike pocket. La Luna and Asia Solo can not be entered at all. They are not so much environments, therefore, as three-dimensional paintings, and their subject is landscape: moons and sand, licorice-colored skies, cave darkness, vines...
Like angry ants in a vast sandpile, the combatants in a little-known African war of liberation are carrying out search-and-destroy missions in the desolate 100,000-sq.-mi. area once known as the Spanish Sahara. On one side are an estimated 30,000 troops from Morocco and Mauritania, which claimed the land that Spain surrendered sovereignty over last year under strong United Nations pressure. Opposing are the 5,000 guerrillas of the Frente Polisario (for Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra and Rio de Oro, the two provinces involved). Polisario is fighting to gain...
TIME Correspondent David Beckwith, who spent two weeks with Polisario guerrillas in the desert, reports that so far the shadowy Sahara war is a standoff. The Moroccans and Mauritanians hold the villages but venture cautiously into the desert for fear of ambush; Polisario fighters as a result roam freely over much of the territory, boastfully but inaccurately declaring it "liberated." The guerrillas, though, have carried the war into both Morocco and Mauritania. Last June Polisario even attempted a mortar attack on the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott (see map). Although the guerrillas lost 200 men, including Polisario's founder, Mohammed...
...Boston. Menzel observed his first solar eclipse as a boy in Colorado, and spent the rest of his life studying the sun and its corona. A member of the Harvard faculty for nearly 40 years. Menzel watched 15 total solar eclipses, leading expeditions to Siberia, the Sahara and other remote outposts to get the best views. In 1938 he developed the U.S.'s first coronagraph, a telescopic device that allows scientists to study the sun's glowing halo without the help of an eclipse. Menzel was a prolific author of scientific books and science fiction, and an accomplished...
...This is part of a great lost tradition, the meanwhile-back-at-the-fort film," Gene Hackman boasts of his new movie. Cheerfully titled March or Die, the picture features Hackman as a West Pointer who finds a commission in the French Foreign Legion and trouble in the Sahara between archaeologists and Arabs. Hackman grumbles: "A whole generation has grown up without ever seeing a Foreign Legion film. Today kids think the only thing on the other side of a sand dune is an oil well." His new role as a French connection, desert style, will surely set them straight...