Word: direness
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...healthcare programs. As President Obama said today: "The explosion in health care costs has put our federal budget on a disastrous path. This is largely due to what we're spending on Medicare and Medicaid." Not coincidentally, a new report was released on Tuesday forecasting a dire outlook for Medicare. The report forecast that, based on current trends, Medicare would run out of funds by 2017. Just one year ago, a similar report said Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund would not run short of funds until 2019. (Read "Making Health-Care Reform Pay for Itself...
Although the U.N. agency has warned that its new guidelines don't mean Iraq has turned a corner, aid workers fear that's exactly how they will be taken by officials in Damascus and Amman - with dire consequences for the refugees. "I'm wary that this will be interpreted by asylum countries that it's O.K. to return Iraqis forcibly," says Bob Carey, vice president for resettlement and migration policy at the International Rescue Committee...
...Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger, who helped launch a global rethinking of biofuels in 2007 by calling attention to their effects on land use, warns that the EPA assumptions are extremely optimistic - and that if they're wrong the consequences could be extremely dire. "It takes a lot of land to make a small amount of energy," Searchinger says. "Academic studies have concluded that if the world gets even 10% of its energy from these new kinds of crops, most tropical forests will probably disappear." (Read "The Clean Energy Scam...
...such dire circumstances, the North's leaders not only consider nuclear weapons and long-range missiles a necessary deterrent, they surely also regard them as their only bargaining chips. And the bargaining can only be with Washington, which Pyongyang has recognized for some time as its best hope for surviving. From the North's point of view, any bargain would have to take the form of a new package deal that would reaffirm to Kim Jong Il that the U.S. is not hostile to the regime, accepts its legitimacy and is willing to provide long-term development assistance. Only...
What about all the dire predictions, particularly in the British press, about South Africa under Zuma becoming the new Zimbabwe? Mugabe is Zimbabwe and has been for 29 years. South Africa is far more sophisticated. It has big business, big independent media and big independent civil society. The government is only one of many determinants of South Africa's future...