Word: direness
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Considering the potentially dire consequences -- economic, military and diplomatic -- of a hasty return to doing business with Iraq, the U.S. wants to err on the side of caution. That is also the position of the U.N. inspectors, who bear primary responsibility for making sure that Saddam's infernal death machine does not spring back to life. If the sanctions are lifted and the Iraqis renege on their promises, putting the restrictions back again may prove to be too little, too late...
...American appetite for such missions, even in cases of dire human need, has been dulled by experiences like Somalia. "Lesson No. 1," President Clinton said last week, "is, Don't go into one of these things and say, maybe we'll be done in a month because it's a humanitarian crisis." His reluctance mirrors the public's: a TIME/CNN poll last week showed that only 34% of respondents favored doing something to quell the violence, while 51% opposed any action. Clinton confirmed that judgment with a new presidential directive on U.S. participation in peacekeeping abroad: those operations, it says...
...Clinton administration, which has made health-care reform one of its highest priorities, believes that the U.S. is facing a crisis in primary care. The government says that the country is in dire need of primary care doctors, citing other countries which have a 50-50 ratio between generalists and specialists...
...angry nihilism of punk and heavy metal with the synthetic sheen of techno, The Downward Spiral is a 14-song, 65-minute howl of somebody falling into the void. What keeps it from being just another nauseating exercise in shock rock is the intelligence and creative force behind its dire sound. On March of the Pigs, for example, layers of shifting static are suddenly broken by a lyrical piano riff that blooms like a flower through cracked pavement before the wall of noise crushes it again...
...income tax code, thousands of pages long, is in dire need of simplification. We could dramatically improve our tax system by implementing a value added tax (VAT) to replace the personal income, corporate income, and payroll taxes...