Word: befallen
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...half the increase registered last year-and predicted that still worse times were ahead for 1972. In large part because of President Nixon's defense of the dollar, which has made U.S. goods more competitive abroad and foreign-made goods more expensive in the U.S., similar setbacks have befallen Belgium, Italy, The Netherlands and parts of Scandinavia. Almost the sole exception is France. In a time of worldwide economic uncertainty, the French have managed to engineer their own economic liftoff...
...indeed a land of unexpectedly lush and verdant beauty, whose emerald rice and jute fields stretching over the Ganges Delta as far as the eye can see belie the savage misfortunes that have befallen its people. The soil is so rich it sprouts vegetation at the drop of a seed, yet that has not prevented Bengal from becoming a festering wound of poverty. Nature can be as brutal as it is bountiful, lashing the land with vicious cyclones and flooding it annually with the spillover from the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers...
Similar misfortune has befallen The Angel Levine, Bernard Malamud's pithy and whimsical parable of an elderly Jewish tailor and his war with God. In the film Zero Mostel portrays Mishkin, a decrepit, latter-day Job on whom God has visited terrible plagues. His Manhattan shop has burned to the ground while insufficiently insured. His wife Fanny (Ida Kaminska) is on her death bed and driving him meshugge (crazy) with petty demands. His back is killing him and-ah, cruel Jehovah!-his only daughter has married an Italian. His faith is moribund, and to revive it an unlikely angel...
...unusual mixed economy where 20% to 25% of industry is held by government-controlled corporations. These corporations, which are concentrated in steel, transportation, construction and other basic industries, often have a privileged access to capital that leaves smaller private companies short of cash-an ill that has never befallen Fiat...
...those sorry circumstances have befallen Asher J. Cole, 58, co-founder (in 1948) and chief executive of National Video Corp. The company is the Chicago TV tubemaker whose stock had been one of the darlings of the American Stock Exchange, rising from a low of $10.75 in 1964 to a peak of $120 a share in 1966. Now it is down to about $13. After reeling off a series of sad statistics to his stockholders, Cole announced that he would yield his presidency to a younger executive, move into the chairmanship-and give up his yearly salary "as a gesture...