Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...there is little happiness in Kapikule as ethnic Turks continue to flee from a draconian assimilation campaign waged against them by the Bulgarian Communist regime to a homeland that is hard-pressed to give them asylum. Refugees tell of five grim years of escalating pressure -- their schools closed, their language outlawed, their music silenced and their names changed for Slavic ones. Worst of all, in their view, Muslim worship was banned, a repression extending literally from the cradle to the grave: circumcision was forbidden, and Turkish burial grounds closed...
...Soviet account in this age is a contradiction of almost everything practiced by the eight Presidents who preceded Bush over the past 43 years. Ronald Reagan, with a certain grim humor, could tell how he had written notes to three Soviet leaders in a row; before the letters reached them, "they all died." Bush not only wants Gorbachev to stay healthy, he may literally have offered up an Episcopal prayer or two for his success. Further, Bush has put his note writing to Gorbachev on a routine basis instead of limiting it to moments of crisis. The letters contain subtle...
Perhaps the most startling fact to emerge from the grim gallery on the preceding pages is the pervasiveness of suicides -- 216, or 47% of the week's total gun deaths. That proportion was actually below average: for at least three decades, suicides have generally accounted for more than half the nation's annual firearms fatalities. And while the overall U.S. suicide rate climbed from 11.9 to 12.8 per 100,000 people from 1980 to 1986, the percentage of suicides committed with guns has also been rising. In 1986, 64% of the men and 40% of the women who committed suicide...
...Freddy's grim vision has not quite come true yet, but the extent of gambling among the American people is already as striking as the figures on the amount of money they bet. Dr. Howard Shaffer of Harvard's Center for Addiction Studies figures that the proportion of American adults who bet at least occasionally has risen from 60% two decades ago to 80% now; other estimates range up to 88%. Nor is betting confined to adults: Henry Lesieur, a sociologist at St. John's University in New York City, found in a 1987 study that 86% of New Jersey...
...problems he had identified did not exist. The suspect window had been nailed shut, and 20 years of Russian bird droppings had accumulated on it. An examination of the walls quickly showed that the flues had not been enlarged. Still, the White House would not forget this early, grim warning that the KGB had burrowed into the heart of the Moscow embassy...