The book also has bleak messages about the Clinton administration's foreign policy failures in Africa and some trenchant words on Africa's own responsibility for the slave trade.

Stocks lost ground last week as the conflict in the Middle East and bleak messages about the future of corporate profits cast a shadow over the market.

To be most effective, the package must convey to workers the bleak message that the companies they work for cannot prosper unless they leave.

They bore a white-on-black version of the smiley face with its expression inverted, frowning beside a bleak message: "This is the face of our social state."

"Some people see it as a bleak message, some people see it as a message of hope," Mr. Rodriguez said.

As a door-to-door peddler of slick magazines, I first inhaled this bleak message in Saturday Evening Post editorials of the 1930's.

She saw women's position within culture as suffocatingly fixed, and her narratives, as a rule, end with the bleak message that there is no escaping male dominance.

"Love and Human Remains" is chilling enough to send viewers away looking over their shoulders, and provocative enough to make them mull over its bleak message.

He returned to the Hague with the bleak message that capitulation was the only option.

"Runaway" has a bleaker message: One little mistake can really mess it up.