Word: tragic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shame this is the standard reaction we have to our problems. And the even greater shame? That such foolishness had to distract us, me included, from the tragic end of a life that held so much promise...
...Gevisser's treatment, Mbeki emerges as a tragic figure. The book's title refers to a Langston Hughes poem that Mbeki, warning of growing popular anger at persistent inequalities in postapartheid South Africa, quoted before Parliament in 1998: "What happens to a dream deferred? It explodes." But Mbeki has been unable to bridge the divide, and that failure has bolstered support for the earthy populist Zuma...
...ending the Cold War, Gorbachev remains a source of hope and inspiration. Unfortunately, the transition to democracy that he initiated in Russia is far from complete. The parliamentary elections that took place on Sunday, which cemented the power of the autocratic Russian President Vladimir Puttin, were nothing but a tragic comedy. Putin’s party won the election—a run up to the presidential election to succeed Putin in title, but likely not power, next March—in a landslide. United Russia gained a projected 315 seats in the 450-seat Duma. By contrast, the Communist...
...decade-old international treaty designed to limit emissions and pollution that cause global warming. Ironically, the United States has already signed the Kyoto Protocol (under the Clinton administration) but foregone the minor detail of actually ratifying it. The United States’ failure to ratify the Protocol is tragic in contrast with the tenor of the global warming discussion virtually everywhere else: Witness the dire climate assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, and Prime Minster-elect of Australia Kevin Rudd’s winning campaign promise to sign the protocol...
Like the previous crackdown in 1988, the latest massacre in Burma remains shrouded in mystery. But there is a tragic changelessness in the scene of a crowd of unarmed people being gunned down by an army. From Jallianwala Bagh to Tiananmen to Rangoon, it must be the most frightful of all spectacles, as Churchill quoted Macaulay, to witness the strength of a civilization without its mercy. And to that we must add, without its memory...