Shut Up! From the Wall Street Journal of March 22, 1990: “More than half of Cairo’s 12 million residents use sleeping pills and other sedatives to escape the city’s deafening noise, the semi-official al-Ahram newspaper said. The incessant blare of car horns and loudspeakers at mosques has forced 62 percent of the population to use pills to get to sleep, the paper quoted an official survey as saying. The noise has inflicted high blood pressure on a further 33 percent of the residents, it said. In one central city square, noise levels are ten times higher than those acceptable by international health standards, the newspaper added.”