Word: direness
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...when a recently released CIA report seemed to paint too dire a picture of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee pressured Tenet to declassify testimony by a top aide who rated the likelihood of Saddam's initiating a chemical or biological weapons attack against the U.S. as "low." That testimony appeared to contradict Bush's claim in Cincinnati that Saddam could lob those weapons at the U.S. or its allies "on any given day." Bush sympathizers saw a sellout by the CIA. "That wasn't intelligence, that was pure speculation," groused a former senior...
...less endangered, although some local recovery programs are having an effect. In the U.K., otters - once plentiful before being driven into smaller remote coastal areas - are returning to former habitats in greater numbers, thanks in part to cleaner rivers and the reduced use of pesticides. With so much dire environmental news these days, such glimmers of hope are worth celebrating - Hugh Porter...
...which are new to the list since 2000. But not all the news is bad. In the last two years scientists have discovered at least two creatures once thought to be extinct that are now making a comeback. But the challenges facing the Iberian lynx are particularly dire. One reason for the lynx's dramatic decline is starvation - the unintended consequence of a failed ecological intervention. Since the 1950s, Europe's rabbit population - the lynx's main food source - has twice been hit by debilitating diseases. Myxomatosis decimated the rabbits after a French doctor introduced it in the 1950s...
Much of Western Europe and the Arab world clings to the hope that war can still beavoided if unhindered inspections expose and destroy Saddam's arsenal. But they agree that Iraq gives way only when under dire threat. The issue has come down to how tough a new resolution on inspections the Security Council will write. There's an emerging consensus that stringent new rules are needed. The U.S.-British draft proposes tough terms calling for Iraq to comply in 30days, opening everything, including Saddam's highly suspect presidential compounds, giving the inspectors armed guards to facilitate searches--and, most...
...takes pleasure in “escaping the shackles of the civic”? On the other hand, in times of conflict, Heaney acknowledges that there can be “more reliability in the poetic than the actual,” making poetry a source of strength through dire straits. Indeed, Heaney invokes T.S. Eliot’s conviction that “public activity is more of a drug than this solitary toil [of writing] that often seems so pointless...