Word: hungering
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Nothing is older to man than his struggle for food. From the time the early hunters stalked the mammoths and the first sedentary "farmers" scratched the soil to coax scrawny grain to grow, man has battled hunger. History is replete with his failures. The Bible chronicles one famine after an other; food was in such short supply in ancient Athens that visiting ships had to share their stores with the city; Romans prayed at the threshold of Olympus for food...
Every generation in medieval Europe suffered famine. The poor ate cats, dogs and the droppings of birds; some starving mothers ate their children. In the 20th century, periods of extreme hunger drove Soviet citizens to cannibalism, and as late as 1943, floods destroyed so much of Bengal's crops that deaths from starvation reached the millions...
After World War II, however, it seemed that man at long last was winning the battle against hunger. Bumper harvests in many nations, notably the U.S., created food surpluses in the West, while the development of "miracle seeds" brought the hope that the densely populated poor countries would soon attain self-sufficiency. Then, in the past two years, this optimism turned to despair as hunger and famine began ravaging hundreds of millions of the poorest citizens in at least 40 nations. Much of the ground gained in the battle for food seemed lost as the world's harvest...
...biblical Judea and Samaria for a sitdown strike. The Israeli army managed to hold back all but about 300. One group of religious youths, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, made their way into a 500-ft. gorge beside an old Turkish aqueduct to squat there until the army or hunger forced them out. "It is our right as Jews to live here," said Rabbi Levinger. "No secular govern ment has the right to give away what the Torah has said is ours...
...support the strikes," said Maria Salati, 35, "short-term work is only a prelude to unemployment." Giuseppe de Biase, 40, disagreed. "I don't want to strike. That only benefits management. I'm afraid that if there's no work, we're going back to hunger." Jobless men will receive unemployment benefits, but they will still lose $10 a week in wages. Said Gerardo Mansi, 34, father of five: "Los ing $40 a month for somebody who's got to go through acrobatics to get through the month as it is is like losing...