Word: lethality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...people who gathered to honor him at the Cole Field House, where he had performed so spectacularly on the court, cocaine hot lines around the country were clogged by anxious callers. Their questions were echoed across the U.S.: Could the nation's "recreational drug" of choice really be lethal, even on first use? How could a taste of cocaine kill a world-class athlete who had no known physical weaknesses...
...feast on jellyfish, are particularly attracted to plastic bags. Says University of Florida Zoologist Archie Carr, an authority on sea turtles: "Any kind of film or semitranslucent material appears to look like jellyfish to them." Trouble is, the bags--or other plastic items like golf tees--can form a lethal plug in the turtle's digestive tract...
...Soviet Union, the consequences of Chernobyl could be devastating. Anywhere from two to 2,000 people near the plant were reported to have been killed by causes ranging from the initial blast to lethal radiation, and tens of thousands may have been evacuated from the endangered region. Meanwhile, radioactive gases and particles have spread over a vast section of the Soviet breadbasket in the Ukraine, and water supplies for the more than 6 million inhabitants of the Kiev area are threatened with contamination. Milk from local cows will probably be tainted for months to come...
...most frightening part of the nuclear accident was the radiation that spewed from the reactor and then was carried by winds on its silent, deadly path. In the first few hours of the Chernobyl disaster, lethal forms of iodine and cesium were released into the atmosphere. They were accompanied by other highly dangerous radioactive emissions. At first the radiation cloud drifted above some of the Soviet Union's best farmland, but then it moved north toward Scandinavia. By week's end an ominous pall of radiation had spread across Eastern Europe and toward the shores of the Mediterranean...
...punish the man Ronald Reagan calls the "mad dog of the Middle East." As Americans, transfixed at their television sets, listened to the muffled rattle and thump of the assault filtering over the phone lines of network correspondents holed up in a Tripoli hotel, the U.S. attackers delivered their lethal cargo of laser-directed bombs. As quickly as they had come, the warplanes wheeled out to sea, vanishing back into the gloom, all safe...