Word: direness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...banks demand the unusually aggressive deals because they knew how perilous the company's financial situation was? And if so, could those deals be construed as contributing to Parmalat's downfall? The banks' answer is, emphatically, no. They say the deals were proper, and that Parmalat's dire reality was hidden from them. But Enrico Bondi, the Italian turnaround expert who in December was appointed Parmalat's bankruptcy commissioner, alleges that the answer is yes - and this month he filed suit in Parma's court against the two banks, claiming that both transactions were illegal under Italian bankruptcy...
...situation sounds dire, it is actually much improved. In 1997, a year after watching parvenu Atlanta turn the Olympics into the world's largest county fair--lots of ads, lots of barbecue, no gravitas--the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.) awarded the 2004 Games to Athens. The only reason was history. For 1,200 years--from the mid-700s B.C. to the end of the 4th century A.D.--tens of thousands of spectators from across the ancient world descended on the fields of Olympia to watch athletes compete. Wars were suspended, clothes were stripped off, and wine was devoured in what...
...Despite the dire situation, South Asia's leaders seem more focused on doling out blame than tackling the problem. Indian politicians like to accuse Nepal of releasing too much water. Nepal says India clogs drainage with its badly managed flood-control system, and Bangladesh's leaders blame both countries for inundating them. All three nations see more antiflood infrastructure as the solution. Bihar's water resources minister Jagdanand Singh backs an extraordinary project popular across the political spectrum to build thousands of kilometers of canals that would link every river in the country. In theory, the network would allow engineers...
Instead of fewer than 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and more than 135,000 in Iraq, there should have been 50,000 in Afghanistan and none in Iraq. Krauthammer shouldn't blame France for the dire situation in Afghanistan; France had nothing to do with it. RAFAEL MIRABAL-CONDE Caguas, Puerto Rico...
...stunning biodiversity that we were finding." But in using Riversleigh to track the evolution of local fauna over millions of years, Archer began to grasp its predictive power. Riversleigh, he says, has changed ideas about which creatures should be seen as endangered. Here, the news is good, bad . . . and dire. The koala, for example, appears safer than conservationists had imagined. Its population and habitat have shrunk in the two centuries since European settlement. "But when we go back into the deep time," says Archer, "what we find is that 23 million years ago, koalas were incredibly rare...