Word: direness
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August as Usual. The first dire predictions that the oil would pollute England's beaches for ten or 15 years were soon proved wrong. By week's end, while huge pools of slick remained offshore in a calm sea-thus remaining vulnerable to continued attack by detergents-the defenders had managed to keep sufficiently ahead of the incoming oil to clear most of the beaches. Prime Minister Wilson insisted that all the beaches and the sea would be clear by summer, urged vacationers not to cancel their plans. To illustrate his faith in his own prediction, he announced...
...prospective jurors could claim that he had never heard of the case; each had to be examined closely by prosecution and defense to discover whether he had formed an opinion and how it might affect him in reaching a verdict. The selection process, called voir dire, ran through 27 days and 610 prospective jurors before the jury was finally picked last week. It served to dramatize the legal truism that in U.S. criminal practice the voir dire is often more crucial than the actual trial...
...elephant or a cow, moaned if they had been assigned a picture of a bottle, which could offend Moslem teetotalers, or a disembodied human leg, which has connotations of cannibalism. In a few districts, no one was bold enough to present himself as a candidate; in almost all, dire threats were made against those who voted. For months, the south has been torn by a Mau Mau-like revolt among its 4,000,000 black tribesmen, who fear political domination by the 9,000,000 people of the mostly Arab and Moslem north...
...Viet Nam presents some Americans with an unparalleled opportunity to indulge in a national habit: selfcriticism. In this expansion of three lectures delivered at Johns Hopkins, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright raises enough dire doubts about the American character to doom a dozen Romes...
...history. First, an outsider-Canada's Lord Thomson-took over the London Times, symbol of Fleet Street stability. Then Harold Wilson's economic squeeze caused a drastic cutback in advertising. Finally, last week, a report confirmed the newspapers' worst fears: the industry is in dire trouble...