Word: benign
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Human sacrifice has always been an anomaly in India. Even 200 years ago, when a boy was killed every day at a Kali temple in Calcutta, blood cults were at odds with a benign Hindu spiritualism that celebrates abstinence and vegetarianism. But Kali is different. A ferocious slayer of evil in Hindu mythology, the goddess is said to have an insatiable appetite for blood. With the law on killing people more strictly enforced today, ersatz substitutes now stand in for humans when sacrifice is required. Most Kali temples have settled on large pumpkins to represent a human body; other followers...
...require increased security. Tunnels become potential tombs. Nikes and Rockport wingtips become potential vessels for plastic explosive putty in the eyes of security guards who, given the obvious and proven dangers of laxness, are trained to view the next Richard Reid as just as likely as the next benign case of athlete’s foot...
Potassium-iodide pills are becoming to dirty bombs what Cipro was to anthrax. Potassium iodide can help prevent thyroid cancer following exposure to a nuclear explosion, by saturating the gland with benign iodine, preventing the thyroid from soaking up radioactive iodine, I-131, released by the blast. But that won't help in the case of a dirty bomb, as a homemade explosive is unlikely to contain radioactive iodine. The half-life of the I-131 isotope is only eight days, making it a poor choice for a weapon that counts on radioactivity for its effectiveness. If a terrorist obtained...
Part of the high-IQ fun of Minority Report--Spielberg's sharpest, brawniest, most bustling entertainment since Raiders of the Lost Ark and the finest of the season's action epics--is its mix of future and retro. Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow), who might be a more benign John Ashcroft, and his protege John Anderton (Tom Cruise) run a system that prevents murders by arresting people before they commit them. Yet the Precrime apparatus is so goofily anach-ronistic--three young mind readers floating in a tank and billiard balls rolling through plastic tubes--that your brilliant...
...Intercollegiate athletics has come to have too pronounced an effect on society to be treated with a benign neglect,” they write...