Word: direness
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...state officials, the weekend involved a rapid reassessment of just how dire the situation had become. Speaking out the day after some local municipalities decried a lack of federal or state emergency relief, Gov. Steve Beshear described the fallout from last week's ice storm as the state's largest-ever natural disaster. He then activated every last member of Kentucky's National Guard, dispatching all 4,600 Guardsman to assist with the statewide crisis. On Sunday, they were going door to door in some areas, to reach stranded citizens. But by Monday, there were still a quarter-million people...
...that it would close 9% of its North American stores, giving it 1,163 locations. The company will shut another 14 stores in 2009, while closing six of its 33 North American distribution facilities. Staples is now the dominant office supply brand. "Though Office Depot's situation is less dire than Pier 1 Imports, they are certainly on the ropes as well," says Chukumba. Office Depot's less capital-intensive contract business - which involves making deals with companies and governments to supply them with paper, pens and staplers - somewhat shields it from the more dire retail shocks. But the company...
Meanwhile the science on climate change grows more dire. James Hansen, NASA's climate expert, reported in a recent paper that the world needed to stabilize carbon in the atmosphere at 350 parts per million (ppm) to avoid the worst effects of warming - a more stringent goal than earlier estimates, which had a target of 450 ppm. (The current concentration is 385 ppm and rising fast, up from a pre-industrial level of 280 ppm.) That would require action that is far more ambitious than currently seems possible - both in the U.S. and in the developing world, where the bulk...
...background: there are 12 Chinese zodiac animals, each of which is subdivided by five elements signaling different qualities - wood, earth, water, fire and metal. This year's ox is an earth ox. That may sound innocuous enough, but according to one astrological interpretation, financial markets are in dire need of a spark from the fire element to set stocks blazing. For other fortune tellers, the worry is absence of metal, an element with which they make a simple astrological connection to money. A metal year, they say, brings plenty of gold. An earth year buries all that lucre under piles...
...consequences of going back early can be dire. Last September, Jaquan Waller, 16, suffered a concussion during football practice at J.H. Rose High School in Greenville, N.C. A certified athletic trainer educated in concussion management wasn't onsite, and the school's first responder who examined Waller cleared him to play in a game two days later. During that game, Waller was tackled. Moments later, he collapsed on the sidelines. He died the next day. A medical examiner determined Waller died from what is called second-impact syndrome, noting that "neither impact would have been sufficient to cause death...