Word: steel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Fire trucks, police and medics raced to the scene to begin the bloody job of evacuating the wounded and digging through the debris for the dead. In the process they discovered a Claymore mine, which sprays steel balls in a deadly triangle when,it goes off. It is a favorite Viet Cong trick to set off Claymores minutes after an initial act of terrorism, with the idea of wiping out the rescuers as well. Miraculously this Claymore fizzled, or the toll would have been far worse. It was bad enough: eight dead, including one American, one New Zealander...
Outlawed Stamp. Not quite so funny were the new economic sanctions that Wilson slapped on Rhodesia. In addition to the embargo on Rhodesian tobacco and sugar (the nation's major crops), Britain also banned imports of asbestos (a $30 million export item last year), copper, lithium, chrome, iron, steel and meat. That made the embargo 95% complete. Simultaneously, Wilson ordered a halt to interest payments, dividends and pensions from Britain to Rhodesian residents, thus damming a flow of income that totaled some $25 million last year. He even outlawed Rhodesia's bright new independence postal stamp as British...
...glut has dropped most European steel prices toward their lowest level in ten years, yet the cost of production keeps rising. West German plants are forced by Bonn to use uneconomical coal from the Ruhr instead of cheaper U.S. imports; the difference causes a pricing disadvantage of up to $5 a ton in competition with incoming Dutch and Italian steel. Steel imports, as one result, have climbed from 15% of German sales to 25% in the past five years. French steelmakers must import 25% of their coke, pay a 15% to 20% duty...
...difficulties, wages continue to soar. In Germany they have risen 7.5%, while productivity has risen only 2.5% . In Britain, pay has gone up 8.6% in the last year v. 4% for productivity. Since their rich year of 1960, earnings of German steel companies have slipped a total of $450 million. French firms this year and last had to issue $196 million in bonds to cover costs. Not surprisingly, only the Italians are making significant profits...
...only the Americans' presence that seems to bother the British workers, but also the can-do attitudes that the Yanks display. When Ford bought up a pressed-steel plant at Swansea, the British waited skeptically to see how long it would take the Yanks to get it into production for Ford. They got a surprise: in an unheard of six months, three Americans got the plant rolling...