Word: belgian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...nations descended on Paris, the annual NATO Council meeting had opened. The setting was glossier and glassier than ever before. To replace the sagging "temporary" prefab it has occupied since 1952, NATO now inhabits a six-story, A-shaped (for "Atlantic") building containing $10 million worth of Danish and Belgian furniture, German and Dutch electronics devices, Italian marble, British kitchen equipment, U.S. airconditioning, and (alas) a French telephone system. But as if to prove Parkinson's law of "plans and plants,"* the first sessions in NATO's new headquarters involved a skittish probing of the basic military...
...Belgian Congo, young King Baudouin arrived on a hastily planned flight from Brussels to see for himself what could be salvaged from Belgium's tattered colonial policy. Until last week Minister of the Congo Auguste de Schrijver clung fiercely to the line that the Belgian Congo Africans must be content with local self-rule now, with a gradual transition to independence in 1964. His plans collapsed when Joseph Kasavubu's big Abako Party and other native groups announced a boycott of territorial elections, the first step in De Schrijver's plan for a slow evolution. As nervous...
...four submarines from the U.S.'s General Dynamics Corp, word leaked out that the nephew of the navy minister who ordered the subs stood to collect a $300,000 "commission." The latest scandal brewing is in Cuba, where Fidel Castro agreed to pay $150 each for 24,000 Belgian automatic rifles worth $75 each. The fancy equipment is often short-lived. Days after Ecuador got three Canberra turbojet bombers, a mechanic cracked up two of them taxiing on the landing strip...
...Frenchmen took special pride in paying off $200 million on a debt to the International Monetary Fund ahead of schedule, piled up their first trade surplus with the U.S. in 60 years, and grew so confident that one Belgian banker remarked: "The French no longer have an inferiority complex growing out of their defeat in the war and their economic troubles. In fact, they have just the opposite...
...advantage. And until lately, European nations have talked poor mouth (Italy, for example, likes to bring up its own impoverished south, the Mezzogiorno, as one of the world's underdeveloped regions). Or they have insisted that British spending in the Commonwealth, French aid to its Community, and Belgian assistance to the Congo must be reckoned as each country's contribution to taking care of the rest of the world...