Word: plight
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Washington, there were the usual miasmal patches of gloom: the desperate financial plight of the British, the menace of Communism in the Far East. Washington worried that the U.S. public too easily put these problems out of mind, or wished them away. But it was human nature to delegate worry. And Americans have never had much capacity for sustaining gloom. Besides, there was a chance that the world, in the long run, was not going to hell...
...knew more details than he had ever known before. Britain's dollar reserves had dropped almost to $1.2 billion, dangerously below the safe minimum of $2 billion. In short, Britain was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy; since she acts as banker for the whole sterling area, her plight also meant the danger of panic and dire economic distress from Manchester to Melbourne...
Some American comment was indeed impolite and some of it was unfair; a great deal more was sound and factual, and it could have given British readers a close view of their plight, which they appeared never to have gotten so clearly from their own press or their government. Britons who, when they got the U.S. loan, complained that U.S. prices were too high (and would cut down the amount of goods Britain would be able to buy in the U.S.) now cried that U.S. prices were too low; British manufacturers could not compete with them. Other Laborite headlines: "Stop...
Leech's "Utopia on the Rocks-British Socialism in Action" was a readable but superficial, highly editorialized and sparsely documented roundup of the crisis.What Journalist Leech had set out to prove was that most of the blame for Britain's plight lay on the Labor government and its Socialism. What he proved more sharply was that Britons had been largely unaware of the rising tide of criticism of the Labor government and the new crisis. They had been brushing off attacks as mere Tory politicking, were shocked to discover that many of the same criticisms were being made...
...plight of Farmer Ah Teng, a refugee from a village near Canton, was typical of China's immemorial calamity. Even war had not been so dread a scourge as the flood. "When the Japs were here," said Ah Teng, "the battle raged four times across our village. But through it all we lived in the same hut. Now the hut has been swept away. My only buffalo, the pigs and chickens-all we have is gone...