Word: birding
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From two deaths to millions may seem like a big leap. But this strain of influenza, called H5N1, though highly virulent in birds, has never before been known to attack humans. Since no human can count on having a natural immunity to what is essentially a bird virus, we could prove especially vulnerable to infection. First discovered in South African terns in 1961, H5N1 has already raced through poultry farms in southern China, killing caged fowl by the thousands...
...health officials can tell, every patient with H5N1 flu was infected directly by a chicken or some other feathered creature. As long as the virus is being passed bird to person, rather than person to person, it is not likely to spread beyond a few isolated cases...
...didn't take a missile. It didn't take a meteorite, a bullet or even a bird. In fact, the safety board still doesn't know the exact source of the spark that presumably ignited Flight 800's mostly empty central fuel tank, a container similar to those sloshing just below passengers' feet in many commercial carriers. But the trigger's precise identity may be disturbingly moot. In a week of technical testimony considerably more alarming than had been expected, safety-board chairman James Hall made it clear that the fuel, transformed from a stable liquid state to volatile vapors...
TAKE THE T-BIRD AWAY After 80 years of dominance by the internal-combustion engine, a new kind of automobile is on the way. Several major auto manufacturers are designing hybrid electric cars that have twice the fuel economy and half the carbon-dioxide emissions of today's vehicles. The sticker price is admittedly a few thousand dollars higher but is largely offset by lower fuel bills. Toyota plans to bring the first such car to the market in Japan this week, and other carmakers will soon follow suit (see following story...
...batch of Simon gag lines, except that the gags are too lame even for Simon in a nostalgic haze. One character is a boorish Italian stud with a penchant for malapropisms (he calls Roman gladiators "gladiolas"), and the play's comic piece de resistance is, so help me, a bird's funeral. Simon, like Mamet, is content to trot out his characters two at a time for a series of unfulfilling, barely connected dialogues...