Word: bleak
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...Hong Kong's financial sector, of course, has been hard hit by the recent global economic recession. Unemployment from May to July this year rose to 5.4%, up from 3.3% in mid-2008. And despite optimistic signs of recovery, the outlook for employment is bleak "as business sentiments remain cautious and employers are generally conservative in hiring new hands," said Hong Kong's Secretary for Labor and Welfare, Matthew Cheung, in a statement in mid-August. To stem the shock, the government has instituted relief measures including rental waivers for its lower-income public-housing tenants...
...jobs in July. And the unemployment rate would have gone up, possibly to 9.7%, if the 400,000 Americans who had previously been searching for a job (but became so discouraged they stopped) had continued to seek employment in July. Economists expect the job picture to remain bleak well into...
...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...