Word: direness
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Favorite Song: Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straights
...better be a big one, with copious bookshelves and an acre of bare wall. The shelves can hold the reports, of which there have been depressingly many, on the nation's lack of preparedness for homeland security. (The three most recent ones total more than 500 dire pages. And the new General Accounting Office report says that federal bioterrorism defense is so chaotic the agencies can't even agree on which threats to worry about.) The wall space is needed for Ridge's organizational chart, for he will have to coordinate the activities of more than 40 federal agencies...
...dire is the situation? The book is of two--or perhaps three--minds about it. Large sections are meticulously reported, offering eyewitness descriptions of four-story Soviet anthrax-fermenting tanks and behind-the-scenes accounts of the Pentagon's scramble to make enough vaccine to protect half a million Gulf War troops from an Iraqi germ attack (it fell 350,000 doses short). Other sections repeat uncritically the most alarmist anecdotes--such as the assertion, lifted from an obscure 1988 book, that the U.S. secretly sprayed American cities with mild germs to investigate the likely impact of deadly pathogens...
...What is clear, however, is that the terrorists struck at the worst possible time for Asia. In the months before the attacks, the region's economies were already in dire shape, largely because the U.S. market for the things Asia makes?computers, cars, high-tech gadgets?had all but dried up. Exports account for more than 60% of Malaysia and Singapore's GDP, while the number is around 50% for Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines. About half of those shipments go to the U.S., and analysts say that the attacks could cause American demand to nosedive a further...
Edgar, his mother and his brother eventually found a way to come to the US; from their new home in Memphis, Tennessee they watched as the political and economic situation in Sierra Leone remained dire. The RUF signed a peace treaty with the UN-supported government in July of 1999, but broke it in May of 2000 by capturing 500 UN peacekeepers. Then in November of 2000 another peace accord was signed and some of the violence in the western part of the state, including Freetown, subsided. The RUF still controls much of the east, however, including Sierra Leone?...