11.   Millions of Chinese live in dire poverty, and government budgets at all levels are stretched to the breaking point.

12.   Raised in dire poverty by his abandoned mother in rural eastern Cuba, Arenas received a haphazard formal education.

13.   Some youngsters in dire poverty became steeped in fundamentalist theology at Islamic seminaries, where they were given free room and board.

14.   The people are oppressed and live in dire poverty.

15.   And despite new hope, most Pashtuns, like every other ethnic group in Afghanistan, are mired in dire poverty.

16.   But it has not helped to end the cycle of dire poverty that worsened under an international embargo to force the military to surrender power.

17.   Cardoso argues that only long-term economic reforms can rid the nation of its dire poverty.

18.   However, most foreign investors stay away from the communist North because of its dire poverty, its dilapidated infrastructure, political uncertainty and a lack of legal safeguards.

19.   In a nation sitting on untold reserves of copper, zinc, cobalt, petroleum, gold and diamonds, the overwhelming majority of Congolese live in dire poverty.

20.   Inflation has robbed millions of Russians of their life savings, and rudely shoved people on fixed incomes into dire poverty.