[freddie_mercury]

Here are some other recent NY Times headlines that use the word fallout

Trauma May Have Fallout Over Generations

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far

As Trump Struggles With Helsinki’s Fallout, Congress Faces a New Charge: Complicity

Inside Uber’s $100,000 Payment to a Hacker, and the Fallout

Nissan and Renault Wrestle With the Fallout From Carlos Ghosn’s Arrest

Fallout is widely used to mean "affect-effects" with no secondary or tertiary connotations.

I mean....you really thought there was some kind of nuclear disaster in Helsinki after reading that headline?

[gojomo]

All your examples use 'fallout' about abstract occurrences – not situations where an actual plane-and-jet-fuel crashed-and-exploded from the sky, throwing some actual 'fallout' across a debris field.

As far as I can tell, clean-up crews are having no notable problems with the fallout from the crash. Boeing is scrambling to contain the damage to its business.

[sk5t]

Nobody with a full command of the language uses "fallout" to refer to a debris field. It is most commonly used in the abstract sense, to refer to negative after-effects, or else in the technical sense, for radioactive pollution.

[gojomo]

The 'fallout' isn't the field itself, but toxic stuff that falls from the sky after an explosion.

No competent headline writer would use that figurative language around an explosive incident where there might be literal 'fallout'.

(The NYT uses 'fallout' to refer to the literal toxic materials thrown off from a non-nuclear explosion, as in stories like https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/21/world/asia/cyanide-levels.... And also to refer to toxic off-gassing from other processes, as in the headline at https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/us/home-drug-making-labor...)

[sk5t]

> toxic stuff that falls from the sky

I know... "radioactive pollution."

The public would not expect a civilian airliner to be nuke-powered.

[gojomo]

As noted in my examples, the NYT regularly uses 'fallout' to refer to non-radioactive toxics emerging from explosions and other activities as well. This usage is also confirmed by many dictionaries.

[sk5t]

The Times in the first (and only working) link uses fallout in the "problematic aftereffects" sense, although I can see how this might be confusing.

[7e]

I can't believe you stole 30 seconds of my life on this "topic."

[gojomo]

As a common consumer of news on sites like HN, headline practices are very interesting to me.