Word: lethal
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Americans got a reminder last week that some war zones are more lethal than others. After seven months in the Persian Gulf with a Patriot missile battery, Army Specialist Anthony Riggs, 22, won a two-week furlough. Back home less than 24 hours, Riggs was helping his wife load a car and rented van to move out of a crack-infested neighborhood in northeast Detroit to an apartment in the safer suburbs. Someone took a fancy to Riggs' 1989 Nissan Sentra, pumped five shots into the soldier and sped...
...jumped from 5 per 100,000 population in 1960 to 9 per 100,000 in 1989. In big cities two-thirds of felony defendants have been arrested before, and about half of them had at least one prior conviction. Drug gangs are often armed with automatic weapons more lethal than the handguns the police carry. A career of confronting the vicious, conscienceless criminal-enemy frays the nerves. It drives police officers deeper into the solidarities of their professional tribe. There they find the support and understanding that they feel they rarely get elsewhere. The public, they think, prefers its innocence...
Fortunately, inversions generally dissipate after a few hours, and there is a break of at least a few more hours before another inversion occurs. As the air grows more polluted, however, environmentalists fear the creation of a lethal inversion that remains fixed for days -- like the one that killed 20 people in the smokestack town of Donora, Pa., in 1948 or the killer fog that claimed the lives of 4,000 people in London in 1952. Even with the closure of the Azcapotzalco refinery, both Mexico's government and its industry will have to work harder at controlling pollution...
Neil Redlener, professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine, argues that police are more prone to use force these days because they are facing a more lethal environment. "There is better firepower and increased violence in the streets," he says. "A police uniform these days is as much a target as protection...
...first post-nuclear big war, almost as quick and lethal as one with nukes, but smarter, fairer, precisely selective in its targets, with no radioactive aftereffects...