Cholera can kill in less than a day, especially if it infects children.
Remember, dehydration can kill in less than three days.
To make a profit, the argument goes, a polar bear weighing 320kg (700lb, the average for an adult) must, if hunting a 2kg goose, make its kill in less than 12 seconds.
Mr. Franklin was the second track worker killed in less than a week.
Two American soldiers were killed Thursday, according to Central Command, raising the number of United States troops killed in less than a week of fighting to nearly 40.
The Nazis had killed more Jews at Treblinka, where between 750,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed in the 17 months of its operation, and at Belzec, where 600,000 were killed in less than 10 months.
"How many more have to die?" Mr. McCain demanded in a Senate hearing last week, referring to what the United Nations estimates are 7,500 people killed in less than a year in Syria.
Some of the older men living in the neighborhood are veterans of the notorious defense brigades, which helped carry out the 1982 massacre of Hama, where between 10,000 and 30,000 people were killed in less than a month.
There are atrocities on both sides, from the killing of raw Alawite cadets, to the desert-prison massacre in which the girl's brother is killed, when troops "cold-bloodedly opened fire on the prisoners, whose brains they splattered all over the walls and ceilings … More than 800 prisoners had been killed in less than an hour".
Such reports still convey a skewed impression of the war's true dimensions, however, the fact is that the Desert Storm campaign, quick and surgically precise though it was, involved battle carnage on a scale and at a pace equal to some of this century's most horrifying military engagements: upward of 100,000 Iraqis killed in less than 7 weeks.
Some high-profile massacres hit the headlines, with 86 elephants – including 33 pregnant females– killed in less than a week in Chad, 26 elephants slaughtered at a wildlife-viewing site in the Central African Republic and 80 poisoned at a water hole in Zimbabwe.
