Word: lethality
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...best seller, Jaws, starred the shark that ate Long Island, became a smashing film and inspired a school of sequels. After some dry runs, the novelist has taken the plunge again. Beast (Random House; 350 pages; $21) features tentacles rather than mandibles. Otherwise it is the familiar mixture: lethal creature, relentless pursuers and vast quantities of saline solution. When waters off Bermuda become the killing grounds of a giant squid, tourism collapses. Whereupon an Ahabian fisherman, Whip Darling, clambers into a submarine and leads the hunt. All the old ingredients are present, from aqua horror ("the creature moved toward...
...roof off the containment chamber. Firemen had extinguished the initial fire but could not quench the combustion of the molten core that was now spewing 50 tons of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. Despite the lush beauty of the springtime scene, everything for miles around was drenched with lethal radiation...
Proud as punch of the Patriot? Amazed at the quiet swish and lethal accuracy of the Tomahawk? Awed by the Apache helicopter and its tank-killing Hellfire missile? So, too, are the U.S. military services, the Bush Administration, the Congress -- and a host of defense contractors eager to turn the war-born popularity of their fearsome weapons into a new splurge of arms spending and big profits. Such is the congressional passion for these high-tech marvels that a new "war dividend" of great value to many people -- but decidedly not to the beleaguered American taxpayer -- is being doled...
...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...