Word: pointblank
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After a futile two-day effort to renew his visa in New Delhi, Romeo Rossellini, inexplicably driving around in a car belonging to the husband of his girl friend, managed a Bombay getaway only after a member of India's Parliament asked him pointblank: "Are you sleeping with Sonali?" The hesitant answer: "No." Brother and sister, sort of? "I wouldn't say that, either...
...shouting "Bombay is ours," and brandishing flags and umbrellas. Through the city they surged, shattering street lights, tearing up railroad tracks, erecting barricades, stoning cars containing members of Nehru's Congress Party. Police lobbed tear-gas shells into the rioting mobs, then fired into them pointblank. Tough Sikh reinforcements were called out, and nearly 2,000 people were arrested. Bitterly, Pandit Nehru said that Bombay is "not ready for self-rule" and will not get it for at least five years...
...hunters-or rather, huntresses-are wasps out for big game to feed their young. They shoot only pointblank, not to kill but to paralyze, since the victim is to be sealed into the huntress' lair with her egg, and the larva thrives only on fresh meat. Though only such consecrated bug watchers as France's late great Entomologist Jean Henri Fabre get in on these magnificent shoots, British Science Writer John Crompton, author of the excellent Life of the Spider (TIME, July 3, 1950), has put all the bug watchers' best stories in this urbane and well...
...spear. Playing Germany's clown prince of the hunt, Reichsjägermeister Göring used to lay down his obsolete weapon, take up a rifle and waddle to a platform erected in the forest. There, he would wait for his beaters to maneuver deer within near-pointblank range. Out among the trees, deep-throated horns would toot calls signaling each stage of the hunt (the sighting of a stag, the shot, the finding of the carcass). Because he sometimes killed half a dozen stags at a single sitting, trigger-happy Hermann was privately referred to by hunters...
Then, last fortnight, the office began to hear some strange rumors about Student Starr-so strange, in fact, that at first the dean could not believe them. But just as a precaution, he called Starr in and asked him pointblank if the rumors were true. Yes, Starr admitted, they were: ever since he had been at State, he had also been a full-time student at Southwestern College, four miles away...