Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Koje, the bleak and bloody island where the U.N. holds 130,000-odd Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war, strife between Communist and anti-Communist factions is constant, relentless and apparently uncontrollable. Recently, among the North Koreans in Compound 93, the anti-Reds got the upper hand, and the enclosure was suddenly converted to freedom. Work parties from 93 began to sing South Korean songs and wave homemade R.O.K. flags as they were marched to & from their jobs...
...Industrial Prince. After the war, he proposed three times to a Scottish lady named Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon before she accepted him. She was a commoner (the first to become a Queen since Henry VIII's day), and dreaded the bleak rigidity of royalty's life: "I said to him I was afraid . . . as royalty, never, never again to be free to think or speak or act as I really feel . . ." On the eve of their wedding in 1923, the London Times looked right past the royal couple and remarked, with more meaning than good manners, that the public...
...Lowry's hatred of his subject soon gave way to fascination. His bleak mill fronts, belching factory chimneys, sooty church steeples and tenements with their threadbare inhabitants took on an otherworldly look for him. "To say the truth, I was not thinking very much about the people. I did not care for them the way a reformer does. They were part of a private beauty that haunted...
Canada's vast area (next in size to the Soviet Union and China) throbs with industrial action. In bleak Ungava, where only the rashest prospector ever ventured a decade ago, a new railway is thrusting through the wilderness to tap an iron-ore lode larger than the state of Connecticut, and perhaps as rich as the famed Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota. Above an Indian village named Kitimat, in the stony heights of British Columbia, engineers are damming half a dozen mountain lakes, creating a waterfall 15 times as high as Niagara, to power the world's biggest...
...well enjoy the world's largest personal income (after taxes). From his pigskin-paneled countinghouse above Sáo Paulo's Viaducto do Chá, the count* runs his 300 enterprises (textiles, cereals, shipping, refining) in the style of a 16th century Florentine prince. Big, bleak and impeccably dressed, the count operates from a deep couch in the corner of his immense office. Across the room is a board with vertical lines of electric buttons. At a sign from the count, an attendant leaps forward, then leaps back to punch whichever button the count indicates. The buzzer-button...