Word: sahara
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Like King Henry, Hassan has a fondness for the bold flourish. He took over part of the Spanish Sahara in 1975 by exhorting 350,000 Moroccans to march unarmed into the disputed territory while Spanish soldiers looked on in disbelief. He gained the upper hand in his eight-year desert war with the Marxist Polisario guerrillas by enclosing almost half of the 103,000-sq.-mi. Western Sahara with a 750-mile-long wall of sand and rock. Just last month he caught Western leaders off balance yet again by signing a treaty of friendship with Libya's notorious...
That, however, may not be enough. More than half of Morocco's 23.6 million people depend on agriculture for a living, and the country has been devastated by a four-year drought. The guerrilla war in the Sahara continues to cost at least $ 1 million a day. Two-fifths of the population is below poverty line, according to World Bank figures, and thousands live in makeshift huts in the increasingly swollen cities. Meanwhile, Hassan maintains a regal lifestyle. This week, for instance, he is host to a lavish celebration of a daughter's wedding...
...scholars like Sir Richard Burton, the Orientalist artists vied with one another in seeking out exotica. Harems aside, the subjects that most mesmerized them were slave markets, carpet bazaars, whirling dervishes, Arab stallions, caravans of caparisoned camels and wind-whipped burnooses of Bedouins on the sands of the Sahara. "There is a fortune to be made for painters in Cairo," noted William Makepeace Thackeray on a visit to Egypt in 1844. "I never saw such a variety of architecture, of life, of picturesqueness, of brilliant color, of light and shade. There is a picture in every street and at every...
Located on the southern edge of the Sahara, it is one of the poorest countries in Africa, with a per capita income of $210 a year. Its 6.7 million people have been suffering from recurring drought that has caused widespread hardship and political instability. This month Upper Volta shed the name that the French bequeathed along with independence 24 years ago. President Thomas Sankara, 34, who seized power last year, decreed that his country would hence forth be known as Burkina Faso...
...spending several weeks in the Sahara also proved to have its fringe benefits--Herzberg received two marriage proposals. After helping remove Herzberg's jeep from a ravine, one gentleman wanted Herzberg to repay the favor by marrying his sister...