dire

Services manager Carolyn Bradbury said: "The situation is dire. We've got about two weeks worth of food left in the warehouse if no other food comes in. We've never had it this empty before."

Texas has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the US, banning all abortions except in dire medical circumstances.

If you keep the camera angle tight on those protests, as many media outlets have done, it does look dire.

But if you’ve jumped into these tepid waters anytime over the last decade or so, you know that shark horror is in dire straits.

Near-shore tsunamis — those triggered by earthquakes just offshore — could pose a particularly dire risk for California’s heavily populated coastal communities, according to experts, disaster modeling and local hazard plans.