Word: grimness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Republicans received in the midterm elections, the U.S. is no longer the all-powerful hegemony, the hyperpower, that it seemed to be after the end of the cold war. To some, the schadenfreude was too much to resist: "They've been knocked off their perch," said one Brit, with grim and evident satisfaction. But much more often, the relative decline of American power was discussed with a worried mien, one that recognized that, if the U.S. did not make things happen in the world, then nobody else would, either...
...That's a grim assessment, since the threats to international order are bigger today than at any other time since the end of the cold war. The most immediate source of instability emanates from Iraq, where the country's civil war risks igniting a region-wide conflict. Across swaths of the greater Middle East--from Lebanon and the Palestinian territories to Afghanistan and Pakistan--armed militants are undermining the authority of U.S. allies. Anti-U.S. regimes in Iran and North Korea have accelerated their pursuit of atomic arsenals. In Africa, genocide, poverty and disease threaten the survival of millions...
...another of those historical moments, with grim death gargling at you around every corner and people being slaughtered like sheep. Of course, Academy voters could heed the incendiary Zeitgeist and vote for Babel, a film about international chaos, or Letters from Iwo Jima, depicting the last days of a losing war. The Queen shows a head of state stubbornly resisting the popular will, and The Departed is a chic bloodbath...
...marriages, the estrangements of a father from a daughter and of another father from his sons, the terminal cancer of one offstage character and the accidental death of another. Simon views the background of the play as "a war, a household war." Yet the play looks at grim events with a tempered optimism, a belief not so much in happy endings as in the renewable dignity of human beings. Simon, always generous to his characters, seeks the utmost in forgiveness for them here. He will not take sides, not even in the battle between a mother deserted by the only...
Wedged between white-capped mountains and sparkling blue ocean, Vancouver is lauded for multicultural livability, ranked worldwide as a top travel destination and is preparing to host the 2010 Winter Olympics. But lately a grim pall has blanketed the western Canadian city of 2.2 million, for reasons far worse than the freak winter storms. The harrowing details of a grotesque serial killer case are bringing to the surface the city's seamy underworld, usually confined to the squalid 10-block open drug and sex market known as the Downtown Eastside...