Word: grim
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...possibility of confrontation will increase sharply when the foreign troops push inland toward the famine belt. The situation to the south, in Kismayu, was grim. Sixty people were killed last week during clashes between two local factions, and all but a handful of relief workers had to be evacuated. Of mounting concern is what the thugs plan to do once the foreign troops reach these cities. Will they turn their firepower on the soldiers? Or will they continue running as the U.S. units advance, pushing into villages that until now have been spared the worst of the fighting...
...Somalia. Relief workers had distributed unmilled wheat to starving villagers, and scores of living skeletons were pounding the wheat by hand in order to make an edible mush. To the casual witness, the rhythmic thuds might have seemed the music of deliverance, but to those familiar with the grim calculus of starvation, they formed a dirge. The energy expended in grinding the wheat vastly exceeded the nutritional benefit of the mush. Relief supplies were killing the starving...
Fortunately, there exists another view of the post-colonial Caribbean, one beyond Naipaul's mordant wit and grim aspect, beyond Kincaid's condescension and Walcott's romanticization...
Somewhere in Moscow, a group of men sit around a table, their faces grim and / resolute as they conspire to launch a coup. That, at least, is what many Russians fear. Warnings of an imminent overthrow of the Yeltsin government come almost daily in the capital, from all sides of the political spectrum. Whether the messenger is a top government official, a parliamentary leader, a member of an opposition party or an ordinary Russian with a gut instinct, the message is always the same: dark forces are at work devising a scheme to take power and install a dictatorship...
...crime is nowhere near as terrible as it is in Washington. The poor parts of the town are grim, but nothing like their counterparts in New York. The people who live here have a cheerful amiability. The relationships between the moneyed and unmoneyed, and between black and white, seem notably relaxed...