Word: direness
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Emergency airplane evacuations happen more often than most people think: about once every 11 days in the U.S., according to a 2000 report by the National Transportation Safety Board. Some situations are more dire than others, of course, as when the plane is on fire, but in many cases, the biggest challenge of an evacuation can be the airplane slide...
...Since December, on its own turf, Moscow has fought with the British Council (BC) - Britain's cultural and educational cooperation arm. The conflict now threatens to grow into a full-scale diplomatic war between Russia and Britain with potentially dire consequences...
...nuclear weapons program in 2003. But a major aim of Bush's tour is to rally Gulf Arabs into an anti-Iran bloc bent on further isolating Tehran diplomatically and economically, without giving up the option of a military attack on Iran, on the grounds that Iran remains a dire threat to regional security. To such logic, Gulf leaders are tempted to reply, "Duh, it was your ousting of Saddam Hussein's regime that enabled Iran to expand its influence in the first place." Arabs would never want Washington to get too cozy with Tehran. But they've had enough...
...would have been the best prime minister for both the Pakistani people and the interests of the United States. But given her track record, it is naïve to think that Bhutto would have quickly and single-handedly turned Pakistan around. Pakistan is a country in extremely dire straits, and given its tradition of corruption, nepotism, and violence—of which Bhutto’s assassination and the ascension of her 19-year-old son and husband to the leadership of her Pakistan Peoples Party is just the latest chapter—there is no clear path forward...
...suffer from it, you might want to give Lester Brown's new book, Plan B 3.0, a pass. Brown - the president of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington-based environmental think tank - paints a comprehensive and depressing picture of the planet, with ream after ream of dire statistics. Here's just a handful: Arctic summer sea ice shrinkage increased by 9.1% a decade between 1979 and 2006, and this year an area of ice almost twice the size of Britain melted in a single week. In an era of unprecedented global economic growth, the number of hungry people increased from...