Word: harmless
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...appointed by the Corporation; to engage in secret meetings; to vote for the first time on total divestiture in 1983; to be deadlocked; to be manipulated by Derek Bok; and to make recommendations concerning the Sullivan Principles--recommendations ignored by a crafty Corporation that always hopes to ride out harmless candlelight marches. Practically speaking, the ACSR is a cooptation of the anti-apartheid movement...
...contents of that refrigerator would be much more difficult to dispose of than all those ash-laden trucks. Coal ash is essentially inert and harmless. Used nuclear fuel rods, which are 12 ft. long and ½ in. in diameter and are fastened together in bundles reminiscent of the fasces carried by magisterial aides of ancient Rome, remain very dangerous. Contaminated by such fission products as strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium 239, they are not only physically hot (at several hundred degrees), but will remain radioactive for thousands of years...
Some parents find it less cool that their children are obsessed with war-related clothing. But most consider the fad relatively harmless. For youngsters, moreover, the protective coloring can have its uses. Phyllis Dixon, of Bob's Army Surplus in Raleigh, recalls one mother who came home to find her entire neighborhood dressed in camouflage. Says Dixon: "She couldn't find her own kid because they all looked alike." -By Richard Zoglin. Reported by Carol Fletcher/Chicago and Stanley W. Robblns/Atlanta
Though the Nazis have never been outdone in applying seemingly harmless labels to the most hideous practices, most governments sooner or later find euphemism an indispensable device. "Pacification" has become a popular term for war ("War is peace," as the Ministry of Truth says in Nineteen Eighty-Four), but the Romans meant much the same thing by the term Pax Romana. "Where they make a desert, they call it peace," protested an English nobleman quoted in Tacitus. Viet Nam brought us new words for the old realities: soldiers "wasted" the enemy, some "fragged" their own officers, bombers provided "close...
Researchers speculate the woman's reaction was caused by a natural toxin called atropine. Harmless traces of the substance had gotten into some packages of the tea in a still unknown way. At first Celestial's founder and chairman, Mo Siegel, 34, talked vaguely of "supply problems," but last week he gave a detailed explanation of the incident. Said one investment banker: "A lot of people would not have said anything. His decision was very ethical...