Word: dourness
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...lack of security is driving the country's best and brightest to leave, or at least send their children away. It's a particularly cruel option for Iraqis used to living together in extended clans. The doctor has two married daughters living abroad, and Nafret's dour husband Firas, 40, says his family would leave too if they could afford to. The couple and their two children share the home with Nafret's family. Firas can see no way out of Iraq's current misery. "Everything is bad," says Firas. "Very bad." He and his father-in-law squabble over...
...qualify for all these titles thanks to his abrupt, massive and raggedly executed U-turn last week. After months of deriding a referendum on the proposed European Union constitution as a "gross and irresponsible betrayal of the true British national interest," he endorsed the idea after all. The normally dour Conservative leader, Michael Howard, was gleeful as he mocked Blair's pirouette during a House of Commons debate. "Six months ago, the Prime Minister stood before his party conference and said, with all the lip-quivering intensity for which he has become famous, 'I can only...
...excellent op-ed in Tuesday’s New York Times by Harvard’s own Samantha Power, the Sudanese crisis has largely been ignored by the Western press. Our leaders have also remained silent. Unfortunately, this comes as little surprise. Compared with the latest dour dispatches from Iraq and the recent revelations in the post-9/11 drama, the troubles of some little known African nation hardly makes for big news...
Khamenei, who smiles about as often as did his dour predecessor, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, had appealed for a big turnout. It may be days before anyone knows the exact tallies from elections that Khamenei, despite his upbeat words, knows alienated many Iranians, young and old. But whatever the precise totals, the results are likely to hand Khamenei's conservative political allies a healthy majority in the 290-seat Majlis, dealing a devastating blow to reformists who swept into the assembly four years ago trumpeting an era of democratic change...
...with exasperation as he pushed Clarke to explain her interpretation. Did a feminist interpretation, he asked, determine the play’s opening scenes—which feature Karen MacDonald as an impudent Hippolyta, swollen with mute resentment of her husband Theseus (John Campion), the top-heavy emblem of dour autocratic unreasonableness? Clarke didn’t think so. “Quite often, I don’t know why I make the selections I make. I kind of instinctually and intuitively move through decisions...