Word: bleak
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...That bleak reality has some observers, such as Alex de Waal, program director at the Social Science Research Council in New York, wondering whether Darfur, in particular, will be a high water mark for the idea of an "international responsibility to protect." Says de Waal: "For complex peacekeeping operations to work - i.e. those that involve civilian protection, rebuilding governance structures - they seem to need such a high ratio of input to outcome that they are feasible only in small places like Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone ... and possibly the Comoros. Try doing it on a larger scale with a serious...
...Films that perform well when times are bleak are pretty similar to films that perform well when weather is hot - comic book movies, animated films, sequels, "movies kids drag their parents to," says Dergarabedian. That's good news for summer movies like the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, Jack Black's Kung Fu Panda, and the latest Chronicles of Narnia installment, Prince Caspian, and less auspicious for the Dakota Fanning Southern Gothic sex-abuse movie, Hounddog...
...sense of security. The exterior goings-on of this “Pleasantville”-esque neighborhood renders its interior discord shocking. “Snow Angels,” while successful in its faithful representation of human relationships, suffers from some heavy-handed production choices that warp the bleak into the boring. Most notably, the ending drags on painfully as the climax gets buried beneath a long series of concluding scenes. Green manages to tie together each relationship’s loose threads—some neatly, some clumsily—but the time he takes...
...majority of Iraqis, the future is bleak indeed. More than two million—most of them middle-class professionals—have left the country, with another two million internally displaced. This means that, for those who remain, the numbers of doctors, professors, university teachers, engineers and technicians available to them sinks by the day. Meanwhile, central government has more or less ceased to exist, leaving the provision of social services to local sectarian strong-men and their militias who allocate these services on a mainly religio-political basis. In short, most Iraqis now live in localities governed...
...Paradigm Hotel Rwanda (2004) The 1994 genocide serves as a wake-up call to the West, with Rwanda as a bleak symbol of ignored injustices everywhere...