Word: direness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seem to be able to buy a friend in California these days. Minority groups and liberals loathe him for his vocal stances against illegal immigrants and affirmative action, a vociferousness that is equaled by the right wing of his own party for his socially liberal positions. His dire political straits were further emphasized by his negligible '96 presidential run that seemed to end before it began and by his failure to successfully lead a fight to change the G.O.P. platform's stance on abortion at the Republican Convention in his hometown of San Diego...
...visionary. She spent a lifetime comforting the dying castoffs of humanity's inability to come to terms with the need to stabilize population growth. Sadly, she often castigated those who promoted family planning. Overpopulation is literally greed personified, and if it is not confronted, all living things will suffer dire consequences. Every day thousands of children die as a result of unsustainable population growth. This is no time to create saints of people who cannot understand this harsh reality. BILL ISBISTER, Director Too Many People...Too Little Earth! Aloha...
...tales of human resilience sustain Brandt as he watches some of the program's participants progress from risk to clinical manifestation to full-blown illness to death. "You can't help being impressed by the human drama of it," he says. Indeed, the sharing of stories, both happy and dire, is often his best tool for compelling people to weigh seriously the pros and cons of testing. "Most people," he says, "resonate more to the stories than to the psychological tests and statistical results...
...culprit: a lethal strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli. The bug causes 20,000 infections a year in the U.S., most because of undercooked beef. The typical result is excruciating gastrointestinal distress. But for a few unlucky souls though--usually young children and the elderly--the consequences can be dire, even fatal...
Wall Street, by contrast, showed little concern over Apple's dire predicament, bumping the company's stock up by more than half in the days following Jobs' canny capitulation. What change in Apple's circumstances justified this startling re-evaluation? Besides buying stock, Microsoft propped up the tottering Macintosh platform by pledging three years' worth of Mac versions of its office software and cooperation with Apple on upcoming products. Apple's richest boon, though, may be psychological; by promising to publish Mac software into the next century, Microsoft lets Mac customers and developers alike trust the platform to exist that...