Word: lefting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...groundwater rises, it dissolves mineral salts from the soil and bedrock. Ancient buildings, many made of porous limestone, act like sponges, sucking this salty water from the ground. When the water evaporates, the salts are left behind; when this happens at the stone's surface, these crystallize into destructive white lesions...
...much like that anymore. Ten years after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, an episode far more characteristic of the present moment, and also true, is seeing a waiter from a fancy restaurant chasing up the street after a pinstripe suit, waving a small object, shouting "Sir! Sir! You left your telephone on the table...
...British themselves are more divided. There are few outright swooners. And the complaints resemble familiar complaints against the Republican Administration that has ruled America during most of the Thatcher era. She has created, say both the left and the traditional right, a vulgar, selfish, money-obsessed society, drained of more humane values. Her prosperity has been selective; the gap between haves and have-nots has increased. She has ignored the environment, allowed the public infrastructure to rot, starved the universities and other worthy institutions and causes that depend on public funds. For all her talk of freedom...
There is something in all of this. But even the most left-wing journalist would have a hard time saying with a straight face that he misses the days (just three or four years ago) when unions forbade the use of computers at newspapers. Even the opposition Labor Party isn't proposing to renationalize all the companies that have been sold off to private shareholders or to take back the formerly state-owned houses that have been sold to their tenants. Even those put off by the glitz and the greed of Thatcherworld wouldn't really like to return...
...James Baker in Moscow, then flies to Bonn to meet with Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Early next week he heads to Beijing for the long-awaited summit between Gorbachev and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. The swift pace of change during Shevardnadze's almost four-year tenure at Smolensky Square has left foreign diplomats, to say nothing of his weary staff in Moscow, a bit breathless...