Word: grimness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mood is dark. Death Eaters blight the skies, sent on their sorties by the fiendish Lord Voldemort, and in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a grim fate encircles one teenage boy like a noose around his soul. The adult he reveres most in the world has given him a mission to destroy a hugely powerful wizard, yet as he gazes in a mirror, the quivering face staring back at him belies his resolve to do the deed. It's a dreadful burden on someone barely out of childhood, in his sixth year at Hogwarts. Will Draco Malfoy...
...someone offering few substantive changes, the finance minister seemed awfully proud in his speech, congratulating his party on avoiding the worst of the financial crisis. Yet, smug as he might have been, the reality is grim: According to the World Bank, in 2005 456 million Indians still lived in poverty. Mukherjee’s plans to combat this are well intentioned, but will only temporarily help to alleviate the plight of the poor. It will take the spread of private industry and finance to permanently raise their standard of living...
There are few economic indicators as grim as homelessness, as the Department of Department of Housing and Urban Development demonstrates in its 4th annual report on the topic, which found that some 1.6 million Americans stayed at homeless shelters from October 2007 to September 2008. The Department also noticed some troubling trends: more families seeking shelter - particularly in rural and suburban areas - and more people going to shelters from stable living arrangements (instead of jails, institutional settings or the military...
...change in tactics and command (McChrystal was brought in to replace Army General David McKiernan, who had led ISAF since June 2008) was necessitated by a grim truth. The war in Afghanistan is not going well. The Taliban, funded in large measure by the opium trade, which is centered in Helmand, now controls wide swaths of Afghanistan. Over the past four months, a recent U.N. report says, the number of "assassinations, abductions, incidents of intimidation and the direct targeting of aid workers" has been higher than last year. Increasing numbers of foreign fighters - "most likely affiliated with al-Qaeda...
...completed, but all signs suggest that Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the incumbent candidate, notched up a resounding victory. Since winning the country's first competitive election in 2004, the former general has been a cool steward of Indonesia's young and often chaotic democracy, denting the country's grim legacy of corruption, cracking down on radical Islamist groups and rebuilding a nation that suffered the brunt of 2005's devastating Indian Ocean tsunami. SBY - Yudhoyono is widely referred to by his initials - is seen as a moderate and honest figure in a nation still emerging from decades of cronyism under...