Word: scelba
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...Mario Scelba, Italian Minister of the Interior, gripped the white steering wheel and stepped on the gas. His jet-black car shot ahead along the die-straight highway at 80 m.p.h., leaving his escort of police motorcycles and official limousines far behind. Scelba was racing into the "triangle of death," a section of Emilia in northern Italy, the notorious Red stronghold where scores of men have been killed in violent flare-ups between Communists and antiCommunists. There were plenty of Reds who would have liked to kill Minister Scelba himself...
...Scelba reached Modena, he got out of his car to look carefully at a poster. Under the caption "Scelba is in Emilia. He mustn't get out!" a cartoon showed a mouse with Scelba's face caught in a trap. Grimly Scelba climbed back into his car and drove on-still further into the trap...
...Ramparts. The skirmish of the week took place at San Severe (pop. 40,000), a poverty-stricken market town amid southern Italy's vineyards. There a Red-led band of 4,000 overpowered the local policemen, stacked up high barricades-gasoline drums, junked autos, mulecarts, one steamroller. When Scelba sent armored cars and regular troops into San Severo, the rebels manned their forts, fired stones, guns and grenades...
Twenty yards behind the first rampart Scelba's men were confronted by another. In seven hours of fighting, they dismantled five successive barricades, surrounded and crashed into Red headquarters, hauled its last-ditch fighters off to jail...
...week's end the Cominform's offensive seemed well slowed down. "Western democracy," commented Milan's Corriere della Sera, "is proving efficient." But Mario Scelba knew that it was probably only the first, probing phase of igso's big Red push...