Word: britain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps. But in Britain last week, firemen were the ultimate sidewalk superintendents, watching flames engulf the buildings that they normally try to save. For the first time in its 59-year history, the British Fire Brigades Union had called a nationwide strike, ordering the country's 32,000 full-time firemen not to answer alarms. The government of Prime Minister James Callaghan rushed in 10,000 soldiers, most of whom had received only a few days training in rudimentary fire fighting. At week's end 33 Royal Air Force fire teams were dispatched to 13 cities...
...strikers, who earn $121 a week after four years service, demanded a 20% pay hike that would, the union claims, boost their salaries to the current average wage for Britain's industrial workers plus a 10% bonus for hazardous duty. (New York City firemen with similar experience make $385 a week.) But to combat Britain's inflation rate, now 15.6% annually, Callaghan's Labor government has set a 10% ceiling on all union pay increases over the next year...
...Hospital, six strikers donned breathing equipment and rushed into the burning building. "For God's sake, it was a hospital," said one. "This was no time for striking." At week's end, with no settlement in sight, it looked as if the main thing separating Britain from a major fire disaster was luck...
...award for basic medical research was shared by Drs. K. Sune Bergström and Bengt Samuelsson, both of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, and Pharmacologist John R. Vane of Britain's Wellcome Research Laboratories. The three men were honored for their pioneering work in identifying and isolating prostaglandins. First thought to be produced only by the prostate gland-hence the name-prostaglandins are in fact manufactured and found everywhere in the body. They are like hormones and appear to regulate a wide variety of basic life functions, from controlling the clotting of blood and secretion of gastric acid...
...chain in such numbers that the company's flagship Marble Arch store in London was ranked by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's most profitable shop in 1977. The chain claims to take in one-eighth of all expenditures for clothing in Britain...