Word: kangaroos
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...Kangaroo Courts. To ward off financial chaos, Nkrumah has decreed a strict austerity program. Stiff currency controls have stifled capital outflow. Subsidies to cocoa farmers were cut by a third, and crippling new purchase taxes of from 10% to 67% were levied on imported goods from clothes to automobiles. But the taxes have only succeeded in cutting off imports; from July to September, customs duties were $3,000,000 less than expected. A new compulsory savings scheme requires wage earners making more than $28 a month to give the government 5% of their pay in exchange for government bonds; corporations...
...replied with dictatorial harshness. He ended a wave of strikes against spiraling prices and compulsory savings by clapping strike leaders in jail for daring to criticize him. Last week the tame Ghanaian Parliament-which now has only nine opposition Deputies out of 114 members-passed a bill setting up kangaroo courts, where Nkrumah-appointed judges in secret trials can deal out no-appeal death sentences for political offenses. Some 370 Nkrumah opponents are already in jail under another law by which a man can be imprisoned indefinitely without trial. Ghanaians have been urged to spy "with patriotic vigilance" on their...
...East Germany, terror began to take a grim new form. Thousands of citizens were being hauled before Schnellverfahren (literally, rapid proceedings, i.e., kangaroo courts) for sentencing to the dozens of new "work rehabilitation camps" springing up across the land. To qualify, the victims needed only to be "work shy" or reluctant to volunteer for the army, or merely generally "injurious to the public welfare." Two workers at a carbide plant in Buna were beaten for failing to enlist for military service, then were hauled before a judge, who noted happily that "they got the fist of the workers' class...
...Also, except for the Communists among them, who presumably knew what they were doing, they were all betrayed by Moscow; the volunteers discovered, mostly too late, that they were conscripts in a Communist task force with the most loathsome rearechelon apparatus in the history of warfare-with political commissars, kangaroo courts, execution squads and torture cells. The international brigades so provided a fair percentage of the number (more than 7,000) killed in the civil war behind the lines. In this figure, Thomas credits the Loyalists with being twice as bloodthirsty as the fascists...
...Ruskin might have used to describe Venice at the sight of margarine oozing down a stack of pancakes in a Blue Bonnet ad. And when Mike Nichols and Elaine May did their spiel for a Jax beer cartoon, involving a surrealistic flirtation between a female waitress and a male kangaroo ("How do I know you're not a kangaroo dressed up in a girl suit?"), voices in the audience had a cathedral hush: "This is real entertainment...