Billy was soon calling himself Brandon, and in the teen world of the underprivileged he had become a lady killer of some proportion.
These days it seem as if everything has to be a killer of some sort; an iPad killer, a Kindle killer, a Prius killer.
But as I stood there before the screen, I felt that the real villain in this piece was CNN, placing its stupid rescue story in the foreground, delivered by the flirty anchor at the desk, and then immediately followed by a commercial for a pain-killer of some kind, called Activa, or was it Actaval?
The great majority are poor farmers accused by their killers of association with some group on the other side.
He called the assailants "a collection of killers," some of whom, he said, were former members of Mr. Hussein's regime.
"When people say what animal is the biggest killer of man, some say sharks, some tigers, but it's actually mosquitoes.
There are some vague similarities between Pardo and Michael C. Hall's serial-killer-of-serial-killers.
Just last month, American helicopters swept over the dusty Somali horizon to take out Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a wanted Qaeda suspect who had been hiding out in Somalia for years and training a new bevy of killers; some of those trainees are believed to be Somali-Americans who could easily slip back into the United States and do some serious damage as suicide bombers.
Yet the unchecked killings have also raised wider questions about Pakistani society: about the spread of a cancerous sectarian ideology in a public that even just a decade ago seemed more tolerant, and about what might be spurring the growing audacity of the killers, some of whom are believed to have links to the country's security services.
Some of the keenest killers of little furry things are rough-palmed sons of toil.
