Word: bleak
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...also deal with the social powder keg that is Central Asia. The recession has badly hit the region, with shrinking job markets in richer nations like Russia and Kazakhstan sending thousands of migrant workers home to poorer ones, such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. What promises to be a very bleak year for many Central Asian households has only amplified questions over the stability of the region as a whole...
...most opaque regime always, as if by reflex, reverts to a familiar playbook. In the seven months that Barack Obama has been U.S. President, North Korea has been unrelentingly hostile, testing long-rang missiles and a nuclear bomb amid constantly belligerent rhetoric. Now, having backed its way into this bleak geopolitical corner, Pyongyang says it might want to talk. (See pictures of North Koreans at the polls...
...President Obama green-lights a proposal to create an interagency team of interrogators to handle terrorist suspects, it will be - as Samuel Johnson said sardonically of second marriages - the triumph of hope over experience. The history of interagency cooperation on interrogation is both brief and bleak. (See TIME's photos: Do-It-Yourself Waterboarding...
...haven't given the Afghan security forces the resources to win," Cordesman told TIME on July 22. His 28-page study, titled "The Afghanistan Campaign: Can We Win?," raises strong doubts about Washington's willingness to do what he thinks is needed to prevail. Its conclusion is bleak: "The odds of success are not yet good, and failure is all too real a possibility." And Cordesman isn't some ivory-tower critic - he recently returned from a month in Afghanistan, where he served as a member of McChrystal's strategic-assessment group. (Read "Can Afghanistan Support a Beefed-Up Military...
...know that next year's budget crunch could be even tighter. Thanks to dwindling revenues, paltry collection rates and the economic storm soaking taxpayers, the $142.6 billion budget shortfall that states faced during the 2009 fiscal year is but one hurdle in a longer financial gauntlet, according to this bleak assessment from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Corina Eckl, the NCSL's fiscal program director, recently compared the endless waves of grim economic forecasts to "breaking your leg and then getting pneumonia." Cheery stuff...