Word: bleak
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...crumbling edifice around him. At the lower end of the social order are characters who reside in shacks on the building's rooftop; Taha is the earnest son of the building's doorman, and Busayna is a beautiful shopgirl, whose dream of marrying him is gradually crushed by his bleak financial prospects. In the novel's heartbreaking dénouement, Taha dies in a gun battle with police. He had become a radical Islamist, lured into a terrorist group after his hope of becoming a policeman himself was dashed because of his low social standing and lack of political connections...
...Walls aside, what Israel sorely misses is the capacity to strike fear into its neighbors, deterrence. The Winograd Commission spelled it out in bleak terms in its report on Israel's failures during the 34-day war. "Israel cannot survive," the official statement said, unless it is able to deter its enemies - teach Hamas and Hizballah a lesson they won't forget...
Along with what is fast becoming an irredeemably bleak legacy, the Bush administration will leave behind a lexicon that even our “change” candidates have taken to using. In it, “terror” is defined as a shadowy coalition of America’s (Muslim) enemies, not a feeling; “compassion” is not a virtue, but a hidebound, evangelical conception of charity. Amid this catalog of inexactitudes, the most egregious example must be terror’s foil, “freedom”: In its reduction...
...Root of Kenya's Chaos As a Kenyan, I was troubled by "The Demons that Still Haunt Africa," which distorted the situation in Kenya, either out of ignorance or in keeping with the Western media's romance with the bleak face of Africa [Jan. 21]. Poverty may predispose people to violence, but the postelection skirmishes in Kenya were not a natural consequence of poverty. Kenyans have been poor but peaceful for decades. Rather, the protests are the language of the weak against a regime that rigged itself into power. The violence is motivated by century-old tribal wounds that...
...Root of Kenya's Chaos As a Kenyan, I was troubled by "The Demons that Still Haunt Africa," which distorted the situation in Kenya, either out of ignorance or in keeping with the Western media's romance with the bleak face of Africa [Jan. 21]. Poverty may predispose people to violence, but the postelection skirmishes in Kenya were not a natural consequence of poverty. Kenyans have been poor but peaceful for decades. Rather, the protests are the language of the weak against a regime that rigged itself into power. The violence is motivated by century-old tribal wounds that...