Word: slights
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They seemed unlikely protagonists for a tragedy. Sterling Rault, an outgoing and likable accountant for a New Orleans gas pipeline company, was married to his high school sweetheart and was the father of two children. Jane (Janie) Francioni, a slight, happy-go-lucky girl who delighted in lunching on Saturdays with her grandparents and aunts, was a 21-year-old clerk in the same office...
...chimney. Ray worked fast, standing on the truck bed, stacking his load on a base left by another woodcutter, filling the kiln up to the ceiling 5 ft. above his head. His safety depends on how well the previous woodcutter stacked his load. Once, warned by a slight noise, he had just enough time to jump away from a wall of wood as it collapsed on his truck. "Could have been killed," he said softly...
...During the most recent major occurrence of El Nino, in the early 1980s, sea levels along the California coast rose an average of 5 in. With the added tides and storms, the effects were catastrophic. Thomas Terich, a professor of geography at Western Washington University, warns that even a slight permanent rise in the average sea level could wreak worse havoc. Says he: "The sites with the highest value -- the sandspits and low beachfront -- are going to be severely threatened...
...slight injury that Rajiv Gandhi suffered when he was attacked by a Sri Lankan honor guardsman last week is not the only insult the Indian Prime Minister has endured lately. Just two years ago Gandhi, 42, was hailed as the most promising of leaders, an enlightened Prime Minister whose reputation for probity won him the nickname "Mr. Clean." Today, battered by corruption scandals, local-election defeats, the defection of ministers and worsening communal violence, Gandhi, 42, is widely regarded as pathetically inept. As the newsmagazine India Today put it, "Rajiv Gandhi is not just in crisis. He is the crisis...
...strange, thought Alice, how little nationality or civil status mattered in a heatwave." Remarks like that, the hallmark of Francoise Sagan's simple, wayward charm, occur often enough to make this slight tale worth a couple of summer hours. Maybe it should be read at night, out of doors with a flashlight, because it is essentially hocus-pocus about oversexed Resistance workers in the early days of the German Occupation. Alice and Jerome, both bright, attractive and world weary, have a glum affair going. Seeking a hideout for their efforts to help Jews, they descend on his friend Charles...