Word: direness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...threatened to blow up the wells if the allies tried to retake Kuwait, giving the Administration ample time to decide whether the damage such sabotage would wreak on the environment was an acceptable risk. Now the people of the gulf region can do little but pray that the most dire predictions do not come to pass...
...T.F.A.P. has not fulfilled the most dire predictions of environmentalists, but only because very little of the $8 billion intended for the Third World has actually been spent. Moreover, the plan has not been all bad. It offered a framework that brought rich nations together with Third World countries to begin dealing with tropical deforestation. "There are benefits to having global, one-stop shopping for the basic principles of forestry lending," says Barnes of Friends of the Earth...
Because Gorbachev is relying heavily on the armed forces to keep him in office and maintain order in the country, he may ease off on future spending cuts -- scheduled to reduce the defense budget 14.9% this year. But the Soviet economy is in such dire straits that it cannot provide the enormous amounts of money necessary to create the entire industries needed to duplicate U.S. battlefield technologies. "To be able to do as the allies did in the gulf," says Abraham Becker, director of the RAND-UCLA Center for Soviet studies, the Soviets "would have to revolutionize their economy." That...
...BETTER approach is used in Germany, where would-be draftees are permitted to work in social service projects rather than join the military. This seems to be the best solution. The state cannot claim our lives; in times of dire need, it can demand our service. If the government provides alternatives to military service, then the problems of the draft as we know it would be avoided...
Brown's Democrats, who control both houses, predict other dire consequences: a brain drain that is bound to deter the best and brightest from working in the statehouse, and a weakening of the legislature as it confronts some of its own ex-staffers now in the ranks of special-interest lobbies. One surviving expert, respected Democratic economist Steven Thompson, 49, predicts that when the term limits start taking effect in 1996, the legislative branch could even suffer constitutionally. Reason: the inexperience of rotating members will prevent it from holding up its end of the checks-and-balances system. So vehement...