Word: direness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...circumstances of the crime and her conduct as a prisoner. Despite pleas that her sentence be commuted so she could continue her Christian counseling work with fellow prisoners, she was put to death that November. It was commonly believed that failing to execute the woman would have had dire political consequences for Hunt in the race he lost anyway. When Ed Koch ran for mayor of New York City in the Democratic primary against Mario Cuomo in 1977, the cutting issue was the death penalty. Even though the mayor of a city has nothing to do with the administration...
...have institutionalized our concern about the deficit with the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings bill and saying basically if certain cuts aren't made other certain dire cuts will take place," says Gradison. "I do think there is a growing consensus that cuts across party lines that the deficit has to be brought down and that compromises have to be made...
...barrage of scary rhetoric and hyperbole began not long after young homosexual men started dying by the thousands in the early 1980s. Dire warnings of an AIDS apocalypse came not only from headline writers but also, uncharacteristically, from scientists and health specialists. Declared one: "We have not seen anything of this magnitude that we can't control except nuclear bombs." In 1987 Otis Bowen, then Secretary of Health and Human Services, said AIDS would make black death -- the bubonic plague that wiped out as much as a third of Europe's population in the Middle Ages -- "pale by comparison...
...Number one, there are areas of uncertainty about the greenhouse effect and the dire nature of the ecological crisis we face, which are seized upon as excuses for inaction. This is a psychological problem common to all humanity. If strong responses are needed and yet there is some residual uncertainty about whether you are going to have to make those responses, the natural psychological tendency is to magnify the uncertainty and say, "Well, maybe we won't really have to face...
Prospects are so dire that some environmentalists urge the world to adopt the goal of cutting in half the earth's population growth rate during the next decade. "That means a call for a two-child family for the world as a whole," explained Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute. "In some countries there may be a need to set a goal of one child per family." That is a daunting challenge. During the past decade, many of the world's poor nations condemned the notion of family planning as an imperialist and racist scheme touted by the developed...