Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...incessant border squabbles along the bleak mountainous boundary between independent, isolated Yemen and the British Protectorate of Aden, on the southern tip of Arabia, are, as one British diplomat put it, part of the "burden of empire." Last spring, Aden's British Governor Sir Reginald Champion added another straw to his imperial burden. An Adenese chieftain, the Sharif of Beiham, had asked that a frontier customs post be set up to tap the rich stream of smuggled coffee, skins and qat (an Arabian drug) which kept flowing into his territory over an ancient traders' trail from Yemen. Governor...
...Britain last week began to close out the Berlin airlift. But Mayor Ernst Reuter had urgently warned the Western commandants that the battle for the city, won by perseverance during the bleak winter, might be lost by neglect in the pleasant summer. Berlin faced a serious economic crisis...
...lighted sidewalks of the Spui (The Hague's Broadway). Many of them were moviegoers, eagerly getting down from busily clanging streetcars to see Song of My Heart, Fallen Idol, or Till the Clouds Roll By. A few, however, drifted unobtrusively towards a second-floor meeting room of the bleak Café de Kroon. They were searching for peace of soul and were willing to see if two bearded, 32-year-old Moslem missionaries could show them...
Labor faced bleak, uncertain months before the 1950 elections.* The leaders did not smother criticism from the delegates; they simply prevented any resolution from reaching the floor which could not command a resounding vote in favor. Fiery Minister of Health Aneurin ("Nye") Bevan did not denounce the opponents of full-speed nationalization. He seemed to have moved into the moderate camp of House Leader Herbert Morrison. What Bevan and Morrison asked the delegates for, and got, was a mandate to adjust the speed of nationalization to the economic and political weather ahead...
...Panova's characters is the old party rank & filer, now a commissar with a bleak smile and cold eye, who finds himself bewildered because, though he knows he shouldn't be, he is unhappy. Another is an ugly, peevish, middle-aged nurse secretly in love with feeble Dr. Suprugov. The doctor himself, a weak, cunning, vain, lying, frightened creature, might have come out of Chekhov...