Word: fruitless
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Begun more than a month ago in blood and gunfire, the siege near Waco remained a nerve-grinding standoff with a surreal edge last week. Exasperated negotiators, weary of fruitless phone conversations in which Koresh holds forth on scriptural prophecy and heavenly signs, kept up their psychological warfare. After dark, high-intensity spotlights were directed into the compound, which has been without electricity since federal agents cut the power on March 12. At times a helicopter circled overhead, playing a mobile searchlight into windows...
...manner at the Center for International Affairs on lessons that the United States could learn from Ontario's health-care system. At one point in the discussion, he remarked that the absurd amounts spent on marginal health-care technology to preserve lives already at their tail end was a fruitless attempt to raise our collective quality of life. American medical-research institutions, he said, are trying to do to natural death what the Victorians did to sex--sweep it under the carpet and pretend that it doesn't exist...
Whether the hustlers and hoodlums in St. John's ever gave a second thought to how harmful their crimes really are. Declaring religious institutions immune to crime may be fruitless, but if people aren't even safe in a church, where are they safe...
...biologists and anthropologists assumed that it would be fruitless, even frivolous, to study love's evolutionary origins, the way it was encoded in our genes or imprinted in our brains. Serious scientists simply assumed that love -- and especially Romantic Love -- was really all in the head, put there five or six centuries ago when civilized societies first found enough spare time to indulge in flowery prose. The task of writing the book of love was ceded to playwrights, poets and pulp novelists...
Israel's harsh action, combined with the image of Hamas as the only group still actively struggling for Palestinian rights and frustration with the fruitless peace talks, has further contributed to Hamas' popularity. Time estimates that approximately 45 percent of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories support Hamas, but only 30 percent do so for ideological reasons. The remaining 15 percent see Hamas as an alternative to the PLO, whose peace negotiations have brought no positive results...