Word: direness
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...Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer has said that she is considering naming Eritrea a state sponsor of terrorism. Somalia itself is in the grip of a humanitarian crisis; according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 1.8 million Somalis are in dire need of assistance. And once again--if with less media attention than in 1993--the U.S. is involved in one of the world's deadliest regions. In many ways, the Horn of Africa has become, after Iraq and Afghanistan, a third front in the war on terrorism. How did that come...
...sure, the consequences of a declaration of independence by Kosovo may not turn out to be dire; after the horrors of the 1990s, neither radical Serbs nor Albanians really want to risk a war. But nor does the region enjoy an instinct for reconciliation. Thousands of ethnic Albanians died at the hands of Serbs in the late 1990s; revenge attacks on local Serbs as recently as March 2004 left 19 dead and nearly 1,000 injured, with dozens of medieval Orthodox churches destroyed...
...critics, including liberals who have allied with Obama on other issues, say any solvency crisis could be decades away. They accuse Obama of buying into the dire scenarios with which the Bush Administration tried--unsuccessfully--to partially privatize the system. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went so far as to write that Obama had been "played for a fool." Adds a Clinton strategist: "This whole conversation is bewildering. Every Democrat in America has spent the past several years arguing that Social Security is not in a crisis...
...language of science, like that of the United Nations, is by nature cautious and measured. That makes the dire tone of the just-released final report from the fourth assessment of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a network of thousands of international scientists, all the more striking. Global warming is "unequivocal." Climate change will bring "abrupt and irreversible changes." The report, a synthesis for politicians culled from three other IPCC panels convened throughout the year, read like what it is: a final warning to humanity. "Today the world's scientists have spoken clearly, and with...
...years we've had major disruptions in global oil supplies coming from geopolitical events in the Middle East," says Lewis Alexander, chief economist at Citi. "If you were to see one of those scenarios play out, that would be a big additional shock. The consequences could be quite dire." True enough. But for now, the greater threat to the global economy remains more prosaic: the real and present danger that battered U.S. consumers will renounce their profligate ways and put away their wallets...