Word: nearing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...half the shops are shuttered tightly, though not the Large Soviet cultural center on the corner. Rusting hulks of cars and trucks lie at the side of the roads leading out of the city. Even the front garden of the old Royal Palace has fallen into a state of near total disrepair-the King was sent to a reeducation camp...
Despite the lingering tokens of prosperity in Vientiane, Laos as a whole is near bankruptcy. The country's foreign exchange earnings, mostly derived from exports of timber, tin and hydroelectric power, total no more than $15 million annually. In a normal year, the government has to spend that amount to buy the 50,000 tons of rice it needs to supplement Laos' lagging grain production. With practically no industry (except for small soap, match and textile plants), most manufactured articles, from fertilizer to earth-moving equipment, must be imported...
...nowhere near as politically sexy as trying to knock down inflation or prop up the dollar, but Jimmy Carter has another tough economic imperative on his hands: dealing with the trade deficit. Until the late 1960s, the U.S. routinely piled up comfortable surpluses almost without trying. Since then, rapidly rising imports of oil and manufactured goods combined with the relative slackening of the sales of American products abroad have tipped the trade balance perilously out of kilter. In the past three years, the excess of what the U.S. bought over what it sold abroad rocketed to a total...
What a peculiar order Josef Mengele, the evil Nazi scientist, gives to the aging party goons he has assembled in the great house in Paraguay: Kill 94 men, all of them petty civil servants scattered around the world, and kill them on or near their 65th birthdays as they occur over the next 2½ years. Still, true to their code, the Nazis obey his command unquestioningly...
...rose briskly in August, the Labor Department reported, and the average production worker with three dependents pocketed precisely $182.49, up 5.1% from a year ago. But inflation has made a mockery of the increase, and in fact Mr. Average is 2.5% poorer than he was last year and near ly 4.5% poorer than in 1972. Back then, his take-home pay of $121.68 was worth $96.80 in 1967 dollars. In those terms, the buying power of the pay he pocketed in August 1978 was only...