Word: direness
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...city on the Mississippi. There "the days passed with a swift inexorability that was the essence of a tragedy in a drama." And there the four muddle through a sequence of implausibly pathetic fates. The rushed, bumpy narrative seems less a novel than an outline. One situation is "pretty dire." An approaching party promises to be a "rousing debacle." Two of the soldiers get in a fight with "about seven Navy personnel, to be exact...
...military airfield at Dire Dawa, dozens of green-and-brown-camouflaged MiG-17s and 21s thunder off into the sky each day to strike at Somali forces hundreds of miles away. As they roar down the runway, mules pulling carts plod past the barbed-wire boundaries of the tarmac, carrying jugs of water. The combatants themselves are hardly better off. There are indications on both sides that the greenest troops are pushed into the front lines. One captured Somali who said he was 13 years old was shown off by the Ethiopians in Harar. The youth claimed he had been...
...Somali city of Hargeisa and the port of Berbera, where the Soviets had a missile and naval base until the Somalis ousted them last year. The offensive began last week when Ethiopian armored columns, spearheaded by Soviet T-54 tanks, poured from the strongholds of Harar and Dire Dawa. Air cover was provided by MiG-21s and American-made F-5s left over from the days when the U.S. was Ethiopia's chief arms supplier...
...cause is overpayment of small claims. But the insurers clearly have a First Amendment right to influence legislation." Adds University of Illinois Professor Jeffrey O'Connell: "A court clampdown on advertising is a raw, brutal way of handling the problem. Plaintiffs' lawyers are adequately protected by voir dire [jury selection] procedure." Most analysts doubt the trial lawyers will succeed in muffling the insurers but see the lawyers' maneuvers as effective nonetheless. Says The Research Group's Gingerich: "The insurance companies and trade associations will have to be much more careful in representing the nature and scope...
...fact that these farmers, who are probably among the most conservative Americans, feel the need to resort to violence means, to me, that they must be in dire straits, or nearly so. They have their backs against a wall, a wall of failure. They have nothing more to lose than their farms, and since they will lose those anyway if the cost-price squeeze continues; there is nothing preventing them from following through on their threat, and plowing under their fields. The Farmer's Creed reveals their desperation: "We the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful; have done...