Word: gdansk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Scarcely a country on earth has been spared the scourge. From the festering industrial landfills of Bonn to the waste-choked sewage drains of Calcutta, the trashing goes on. A poisonous chemical soup, the product of coal mines and metal smelters, roils Polish waters in the Bay of Gdansk. Hong Kong, with 5.7 million people and 49,000 factories within its 400 sq. mi., dumps 1,000 tons of plastic a day -- triple the amount thrown away in London. Stinking garbage and human excrement despoils Thailand's majestic River of Kings. Man's effluent is more than an assault...
Thatcher was hardly pleased, however, when Rakowski cited her policies as a precedent for another government assault on the outlawed Solidarity movement. As part of Rakowski's new economic reform program, the government announced, it would close down on Dec. 1 the famous Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, whose workers gave birth to Solidarity during a strike in 1980. Its 11,000 employees, including Solidarity's founder, Lech Walesa, a shipyard electrician for 21 years, would be forced to find jobs elsewhere...
Thatcher did little to hide her sympathies. She paid an emotional visit to the Warsaw grave of Jerzy Popieluszko, the priest murdered by government security agents in 1984. The next day Thatcher became the first Western leader permitted to visit Gdansk for a meeting there with Walesa, receiving a rousing welcome from thousands of Poles chanting "Solidarnosc! Solidarnosc!" "You have achieved so much," she told Walesa and other Solidarity officials after lunch at St. Brigid's presbytery. Polish intellectuals pointed out a crucial difference between Thatcher's efforts to rein in British trade unions and Rakowski's confrontation with Solidarity...
...week. One of its first jobs: conducting negotiations next month with the Solidarity trade union, outlawed since 1981, and its leader Lech Walesa. In his first interview since agreeing to the talks, Walesa met with TIME Eastern Europe bureau chief Kenneth W. Banta and reporter Gertraud Lessing in a Gdansk church. Excerpts...
After two weeks of growing tensions, the mood inside the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk suddenly brightened. Clad in scruffy trousers and jackets, some of the workers occupying the facility joked with one another and guzzled soft drinks. As the afternoon sun beat down on the Baltic port, 3,000 men gathered to sing the Polish national anthem. Then the gates of the shipyard swung open and the throng poured into the streets, marking the beginning of the end of the worst labor unrest to shake Poland since...