Word: harmless
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Independence Day (Knopf; 451 pages; $24) picks up Frank's story about six years later. It is July 1988, Frank is 44, and he has given up sportswriting, which he says "is at best offering a harmless way to burn up a few unpromising brain cells while someone eats breakfast cereal." He now sells houses in Haddam, a leafy New Jersey exurb that bears more than a passing resemblance to Princeton, where he and his wife were once happy. She has remarried and moved to Connecticut with the two surviving children. And the elder one, Paul, 15, has entered...
...lethal agents within. These trainees, cloaked in protective overgarments and masks, would detect and swab a bleachlike solution over military gear spotted with deadly droplets. Each week 10 tons of toxic agents and neutralizers would be burned in a 2,200¡ furnace, spewing what the Army says are harmless emissions from a 75-ft. stack. The toxins to be used at the facility are sarin and VX, among the most virulent chemicals known. While the military would make and store less than a quart of the toxins at any one time, that is enough to kill 850,000 people...
...virologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wonders: "Suppose we get a virus that is both deadly to man and transmitted in the air?" It needn't even be a new organism, since viruses undergo mutations every so often. Sometimes they change into a more harmless form--but sometimesthey get more virulent. Which means that the next time Ebola virus emerges from the jungle, it might be much harder to control. -- Reported by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Scott Norvell/Atlanta and Andrew Purvis/Kinshasa
...Mayfield had but said the word 40 years before, "I'd have spent my whole life bearing your weight." Mayfield doubts that living together could have worked, with "the rest of our lives to kill while the world snickered at us at the grocery store: two old sissies, harmless as house dust." Nothing is resolved between the two except yearning...
...another and lose contact with other people who hold different opinions. The isolation works to reinforce their views, which in turn gives them new purpose. Individuals may even begin unconsciously to compete with each other to make the strongest statements. Nonetheless, many Americans with paranoid fantasies adopt a harmless defensive posture-perhaps stockpiling food, cash and weapons to guard against future calamity...