In the sometimes desperate hours following Katrina's landfall, experts in geographic information services -- GIS -- helped search and rescue crews reach more than 75 stranded survivors in Mississippi.
We hear complaints that it's possible for someone on the West Coast to get a friend on the East Coast to beam them "Desperate Housewives" three hours ahead of time.
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Above all, they had hoped for a verdict on the war's last 60 hours, when a desperate last push deep into south Lebanon gained nothing but the deaths of 33 soldiers, a quarter of the war's total Israeli losses (some 1, 400 Lebanese are reckoned to have died).
Rescue crews struggled to save them, knowing they probably had just a few hours left to live, as desperate relatives clashed with police in their anger and grief.
He, meanwhile, was squirming in his seat, desperate to escape, but stuck with making three hours of small-talk with his recent and best-forgotten conquest.
The past 24 hours have taught us that Facebook is increasingly desperate to monetize its user-base.
"It's about four hours and you've got all these desperate musicians trying to go for a fag and they don't want you to leave your seats and it's kind of not fun, " he explains.
He was endearingly trusting when, a few days before giving a landmark lecture this week on Conservative crime policy, he allowed a pair of complete strangers supposedly desperate for a pee into his house in the early hours of the morning.
The IPP deals were made in the early 1990s, when the country was desperate for generating capacity amid blackouts of as long as 12 hours a day.
For reasons both practical and symbolic, the government was desperate to get trains running again, and within twenty-four hours it declared the line back in business.
In turn, many GPs providing out-of-hours care say there are being squeezed financially by NHS trusts desperate to save money.
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