Word: taxi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Early one morning last week a man approached a taxi driver in West Berlin and asked to be driven to the Senefelder Platz in the Soviet sector. The driver demurred, until the man offered a bonus of 20 marks ($4.76); then he consented. On the way, the passenger leaned forward and dropped a carton of U.S. cigarettes on the front seat. No sooner had the car stopped at the Senefelder Platz than two other men jumped in and seized the passenger, shouting: "At last we've nabbed you, you American cigarette racketeer." Driver and passenger were hustled...
...this stratagem, the Communist authorities came into possession of a taxi with West-sector markings and plates, which would attract no attention anywhere in free Berlin. Shortly after the fake pounce on the "cigarette racketeer," the taxi recrossed into the U.S. sector and stopped on the Gerichtstrasse, a quiet, linden-shaded street in a shabbily genteel neighborhood. The hour was still early. Punctually at 7:20, Dr. Walter Linse, 48, economic expert and No. 2 man of the Investigating Committee of Free Jurists, emerged from No. 12 Gerichtstrasse, on his way to work, and started briskly toward the El station...
...woman on the street screamed; the driver of a light delivery truck started in pursuit. The thugs in the taxi fired several shots at the truck and sprinkled in their wake tetrahedrons (sharp-pointed military devices for puncturing enemy tires). As the kidnap car careened around the last curve before reaching the sector line, the Communist Volkspolizei, alerted and waiting, lifted their barrier, and the taxi sped through without stopping, bearing Dr. Linse into the sinister maw of East Berlin...
...From far & near came hundreds of bent, gnarled and crippled men & women, mostly victims of some variety of arthritis, all pathetically seeking a magical cure. Many thought they were benefited. Undoubtedly benefited were the owners of two abandoned silver mines, hotel and motel keepers, beanery proprietors and taxi drivers. Boulder and Basin had not seen the like since the bonanza days of the 1890s...
...Cairo, taxi drivers stopped their cabs to join the kneeling crowds outside the packed mosques. At Dhahran on the Persian Gulf, the Arabian-American Oil Co. eased its daily work schedules for its fasting, prayerful employees. The Arab cafes of Algiers were empty. In Beirut and Karachi, Western-educated university students put aside their examination papers to meditate on the Koran. Five times a day, from the holy shrines of Mecca to the blackened bamboo mosques of the southern Philippines, muezzins spoke the Arabic words calling the faithful to prayer in a special time of self-denial and self-examination...