Word: british
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cabinet member within the hallowed confines of Westminster. The Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) claimed responsibility for planting a bomb in a blue Vauxhall driven by Airey Neave, 63, who would have been Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in a Thatcher Cabinet. It was the second assassination of a British official in as many weeks. Neave may have written his own epitaph with his views on I.R.A. terrorism: "The British public will become more resistant than ever." Still, the I.R.A. had made it clear that no official could feel safe as Britain begins five weeks of campaigning...
...British go home...
...unsinkable aircraft carrier" of the Mediterranean. After one siege of Axis bombing raids, Britain bestowed the George Cross-its highest civilian award for valor-on the entire island. Last week Malta formally ended its participation in the defense of the West. At Malta's Grand Harbor, British and Maltese officials unveiled a monument symbolically depicting the departure of British forces. Next day Britain's last military commander on the island, Rear Admiral Oswald Cecil, boarded the guided-missile destroyer H.M.S. London, and set sail for home...
Malta, which had been a British colony since 1814, gained its independence in 1964. A ten-year military facilities agreement with London, signed that year, allowed the British to station 7,500 troops and technicians on the island. In return Malta received an estimated $70 million annually in rent and other income. But Malta's emotional and acerbic Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, who once tried to persuade the British to make Malta an integral part of the United Kingdom, decided that he did not want them there at all. The son of a ship's cook, Rhodes scholar...
...British and U.S. officials professed to see no danger that Malta would fall under the influence of a competing foreign power like the U.S.S.R. Some Italian strategic experts, however, feared that the island might be a tempting refueling base for Soviet submarines or even a handy Mediterranean flattop for Soviet planes...